“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
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New York Times Editorial Board: Prying Private Eyes
Whatever one thinks about Edward Snowden and his revelations about government snooping, the case has been a useful reminder of the extent to which the government has outsourced intelligence work to the private sector and the risks in doing so. [..]
It is highly doubtful, however, that American taxpayers are getting their money’s worth. The basic justification for outsourcing government work is to get a job done better and cheaper. Outsourcing intelligence does not appear to achieve either aim. At a Senate hearing on intelligence contractors in September 2011, a witness from the Project on Government Oversight, a watchdog group, cited research from 2008 showing that the government paid private contractors 1.6 times what it would have cost to have had government employees perform the work.
Eugene Robinson: This Will Not End Well
In Syria, the Obama administration seems to be stumbling back to the future: An old-fashioned proxy war, complete with the usual shadowy CIA arms-running operation, the traditional plan to prop up ostensible “moderates” whose prospects are doubtful and, of course, the customary shaky grasp of what the fighting is really about.
This will not end well.
It is tragic that more than 90,000 people have been killed in the bloody Syrian conflict, with more than a million displaced. But I have heard no claim that President Obama’s decision to arm the rebels will halt or even slow the carnage. To the contrary, sending more weapons into the fray will likely result in greater death and destruction, at least in the short term.
The future of immigration reform is, for now at least, not up to House Speaker John Boehner. It is in the hands of a group of moderately conservative Republican senators who have to decide whether their desire to solve a decades-old problem outweighs their fears of retaliation from the party’s right wing.
These senators are clearly looking for a way to vote for a bill that is the product of excruciating but largely amicable negotiations across partisan and ideological barriers. But these Republicans-they include Bob Corker, John Hoeven, Susan Collins, Dean Heller and Rob Portman-want enough changes in the measure’s border security provisions so they can tell tea party constituents that they didn’t just go along with a middle-of-the-road consensus.
Jared Berstein: CBO Scores the Immigration Reform Bill and Finds… (Wait for It)… It Reduces the Deficit
Well, would you look at that: CBO just released their analysis of the fiscal impact of the immigration reform legislation from the Senate and it turns out that the bill is expected to lower the budget deficit by $197 billion over the next decade.
That means that opponents who wanted to make the case that comprehensive reform of our current “system” would be a net cost — e.g., the Heritage folks — just got some pretty bad news. [..]
What’s going on here is that the budget agency expects immigration to generate more costs but even more revenues. Between health programs, entitlements, SNAP, etc., they expect spending to go up about $260 billion over the next ten years. But they estimate revenues to go up about $460 billion. The net difference, about $200 billion, is the projected impact on the deficit.
Richard (RJ) Eskow: The Looting of Detroit
Nearly 100 years ago two young Detroit girls visited a now-vanished island park that had a dance pavilion, amusement rides, and swimming, and wrote that they were “having fun” on a piece of paper. Then they put the paper in a bottle and tossed it into the St. Clair River, where a diver found it last June.
They wouldn’t recognize the place today. Detroit, which grew and prospered for much of the last century, has become a wasteland of abandoned buildings, lawlessness, and municipal debts.
Somebody’s going to pay for that.
It’s not going to be the politicians whose decisions undermined Detroit. And it’s not going to be the industrial and financial executives who made bad decisions, yet retired with their full pensions and portfolios.
Robert Sheer: The Terror Con
For defense contractors, the government officials who write them mega checks, and the hawks in the media who cheer them on, the name of the game is threat inflation. And no one has been better at it than the folks at Booz Allen Hamilton, the inventors of the new boondoggle called cyberwarfare.
That’s the company, under contract with the National Security Agency, that employed whistle-blower Edward Snowden, the information security engineer whose revelation of Booz Allen’s enormously profitable and pervasive spying on Americans now threatens the firm’s profitability and that of its parent hedge fund, the Carlyle Group.
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