“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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Will Bunch: U.S. Government Tech: Lousy at Health Care, Great at Flying Death Robots
Hey, remember that time when the U.S. had a Predator drone hovering over a suspected terrorist’s house in Yemen for four hours, and nothing happened because the 20-year-old junior officer with the missile-firing joystick couldn’t log into the damn operating system? How the entire system of fighting al-Qaeda around the world with unmanned aerial vehicles — planned for years by the Obama administration — failed to come online? And all the folks over at Fox News laughing and whooping it up, saying all the drone glitches proved that Obama is a fraud as president and that “big government” can’t do anything right?
Of course you don’t… that never happened. The reality is that when it comes to the science of flying death robots, the United States is the world leader. Our drone systems may not be 100 percent perfect, but they rarely fail. When it comes to killing people remotely from the air, nobody does it better.
Technologically, that is.
Richard (RJ) Eskow: Negotiate the Budget — but Fight for the Role of Government, Too
Democrats in the White House are confronted with a dilemma. On the one hand, the clock’s ticking on their temporary budget deal with the Republicans. If it runs out and there’s no new agreement, we run the risk of a default and the government could shut down again. But the need to negotiate places them in a position where they might appear to legitimize the GOP’s extreme positions — positions which have been immortalized in a series of Republican budgets.
In the short term, Democrats need to negotiate. But in the longer term, we urgently need a real debate about the role of government in this country — a debate which highlights the ever-widening gulf in values between the Republican Party, as reflected in its budgets, and the American people.
It would be tragic if Democrats won a battle, but the nation continued to lose a war.
Conservative Republicans have lost their fight over the shutdown and debt ceiling, and they probably won’t get major spending cuts in upcoming negotiations over the budget.
But they’re winning the big one: How the nation understands our biggest domestic problem.
They say the biggest problem is the size of government and the budget deficit.
In fact our biggest problem is the decline of the middle class and increasing ranks of the poor, while almost all the economic gains go to the top.
Robert Sheer: What Fine? Why JPMorgan Is Laughing All the Way to the Bank
“I am not a crook,” Jamie Dimon might as well have been insisting in his five telephone calls these past two weeks with U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, asking that a criminal investigation of JPMorgan Chase be dropped as part of a plea deal on what has turned out to be a $13 billion fine on civil charges. [..]
Although the $13 billion fine on the civil charges, which includes $4 billion in direct assistance to swindled homeowners, mostly in depressed inner city neighborhoods, is to be applauded, it represents about half of the profit JPMorgan garnered last year. The company’s stock price, which has increased by 23 percent since January despite a barrage of crises and fines, has not been damaged by the latest settlement.
Eugene Robinson: Now Is a Time for Growth
It’s fine to talk-eventually-about chronic deficits and mounting debt. But now that our government is up and running again, the nation’s first priority should be economic growth.
Sorry if this gives conniptions to all you deficit hawks out there. Actually, I’m not that sorry, because it was the hawks’ over-the-top warnings of impending doom that provided intellectual cover for the meat-cleaver budget cuts we’re living with today. [..]
This is part of a trend. The deficit peaked at $1.4 trillion in 2009 and has been sliding ever since. I don’t mean to suggest that we don’t have a problem. But it’s clear at this point that the extraordinary deficits we saw at the height of the Great Recession were anomalous and that the flow of red ink is returning to normal. The CBO predicts that deficits will continue to fall through 2015.
What happens then? Actually, it’s too early to say.
Dylan Ratigan: Spock and the Art of Healthcare Overhaul
Our health care system is shaped by the question, “How much would you pay to not die?” This is what we have, and it is impossible to sustain. So what if the value proposition was equally simple but absolutely possible: Help me, my family and friends live long and prosper.
Generally speaking, there are only two ways to earn money.
1. Charge a fee for goods or services.
2. Charge a mutually agreed upon percentage based on a future outcome based on the newly created value. This percentage can be in the form of equity or commission.
As it stands, healthcare in America is based on the first model. This creates a system with many, high fees generated by acute and traumatic care. [..]
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