“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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Dean Baker: The Weak Economy and Deficit Reduction: Deniers and Terrorists
The folks making economic policy in Washington are getting ever more resistant to evidence. As we approach the sixth anniversary of the downturn with no end in sight, the nation has been treated to the perverse spectacle of our Treasury Secretary celebrating the sharp drop in the deficit.
This is a bit like celebrating a sunny day in a region suffering from drought. In an economy that is suffering from lack of demand, as is the case in the United States today, smaller deficits are bad news. They mean less demand, slower growth, and fewer jobs.
This is not a complex point. Ever since the collapse of the housing bubble, the U.S. economy has suffered from inadequate demand. The inflated house prices of the bubble era led to a building boom. They also fueled a consumption boom, as people spent based on the $8 trillion in bubble generated housing equity. The bubble generated demand disappeared when the bubble burst leaving a gap in annual demand of more than $1 trillion a year.
The large deficits the government has run since the downturn began helped to fill part of this gap. Smaller deficits mean the government is filling less of the gap. That shouldn’t be hard to understand.
Gary Younge: US Republicans make the poor pay to balance the budget
The impetus to cut food stamps is ideological not fiscal, and low-wages mean work provides no guarantee against hunger
During a discussion at the University of Michigan in 2010, the billionaire vice-chairman of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway firm, Charles Munger, was asked whether the government should have bailed out homeowners rather than banks. “You’ve got it exactly wrong,” he said. “There’s danger in just shovelling out money to people who say, ‘My life is a little harder than it used to be.’ At a certain place you’ve got to say to the people, ‘Suck it in and cope, buddy. Suck it in and cope.'” [..]
Immediately after Obama’s election in 2008, his chief of staff to be, Rahm Emanuel, said: “You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.” The crisis didn’t go to waste. But it is the right that has seized the opportunity. Not content with balancing the budget on the bellies of the hungry, it is also fattening the coffers of the wealthy on the backs of the poor.
Let government borrow for crisis bailouts, then insist cuts pay for them. Guess who loses.
Center-right governments in Britain and Germany do it. So do the center-left governments in France and Italy. Obama and the Republicans do it, too. They all impose “austerity” programs on their economies as necessary to exit the crisis afflicting them all since 2007. Politicians and economists impose austerity now much as doctors once stuck mustard plasters on the skins of the sick.
Austerity policies presume that the chief economic problems today are government budget deficits that increase national debts. Austerity policies solve those problems mainly by cutting government spending, and secondarily, by limited tax increases. Reducing expenditures while raising revenues does cut governments’ deficits and their needs to borrow.
Richard (RJ) Eskow: Hooray for Taxes
Joshua Holland of BillMoyers.com offers an important counterpoint to today’s slanted political dialogue with his new essay on “the high cost of low taxes.” This hidden cost needs to become the center of our public debate. Washington’s obsession with tax cuts and deficit reduction is distracting the American people from the slow dismantling of the social contract, and its devastating impact — financial and otherwise — on all but the wealthiest among us.
Our political discourse focuses far too much on the cost of taxation, while all but ignoring its benefits. Journalists and politicians rarely discuss the direct or indirect costs Americans often encounter when forced to rely on the private sector for services which might be more efficiently provided through government.
Michael Cohen: The TSA shootings at LAX highlight America’s real terror threat
Arguably, the $8bn a year spent on the TSA prevents rare acts of terrorism. Yet we do nothing to stop thousands of US gun deaths
In 2012, 15 Americans were killed in terrorist attacks.
The previous year, more than 32,000 Americans died from gun violence (including homicides, suicides and accidents). That total represents an almost 2,600 person increase in gun deaths since 2001.
So, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the first Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agent to be killed in the line of duty was not slain by an al-Qaida terrorist, but rather by an American with a gun.
Gerardo Hernandez, who was shot and killed at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) on Friday, was tasked with protecting Americans from a threat that barely exists. Instead, he died from a threat that we as a nation tacitly accept as a “price of freedom”: practically unfettered access to firearms.
Harvey Wasserman: Dear Climate Scientists, Please Note the Global Terror at Fukushima Four
Four climate scientists have made a public statement claiming nuclear power is an answer to global warming.
Before they proceed, they should visit Fukushima, where the Tokyo Electric Power Company has moved definitively toward bringing down the some 1300 hot fuel rods from a pool at Unit Four.
Which makes this a time of global terror.
Since March 11, 2011, fuel assemblies weighing some 400 tons, containing more than 1500 extremely radioactive fuel rods, have been suspended 100 feet in the air above Fukushima Daiichi’s Unit Four. “If you calculate the amount of cesium 137 in the pool, the amount is equivalent to 14,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs,” says Hiroaki Koide, assistant professor at Kyoto University Research Reactor Institute. Former US Department of Energy official Robert Alvarez, an expert on fuel pool fires, calculates potential fallout from Unit Four at ten times greater than what came from Chernobyl.
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