“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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Paul Krugman: Plot Against France
On Friday Standard & Poor’s, the bond-rating agency, downgraded France. The move made headlines, with many reports suggesting that France is in crisis. But markets yawned: French borrowing costs, which are near historic lows, barely budged.
So what’s going on here? The answer is that S.& P.’s action needs to be seen in the context of the broader politics of fiscal austerity. And I do mean politics, not economics. For the plot against France – I’m being a bit tongue in cheek here, but there really are a lot of people trying to bad-mouth the place – is one clear demonstration that in Europe, as in America, fiscal scolds don’t really care about deficits. Instead, they’re using debt fears to advance an ideological agenda. And France, which refuses to play along, has become the target of incessant negative propaganda.
Les Leopold: America’s Greatest Shame: Child Poverty Rises and Food Stamps Cut While Billionaires Boom
There are 16.4 million American children living in poverty. That’s nearly one quarter (22.6 percent) of all of our children. More alarming is that the percentage of poor children has climbed by 4.5 percent (pdf) since the start of the Great Recession in 2007. And poor means poor. For a family of three with one child under 18, the poverty line is $18,400. {..]
To add to the misery, Washington has decided that the best way to tackle childhood poverty is to have poor kids eat less. Both parties already have agreed to cut billions from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Food Stamps). As of November 1, payments dropped from $668 a month to $632 for more than 47 million lower-income people — 1 in 7 Americans, most of them children.
And more cuts are coming. The Tea Party House passed a bill to cut food stamps by $4 billion a year, while the Democratic-controlled Senate calls for $400 million in cuts. How humane! And since it will be part of the omnibus Farm Bill, President Obama will sign it. (I wonder how our former community organizer will explain this to the poor children he once tried to help in Chicago.)
Wall Street analysts, corporate lobbyists, and front groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce form an exuberant cheering squad for maintaining the status quo of America’s do-nothing jobs policy. [..]
Well, yes, the official jobless rate has edged down to 7.2 percent, but don’t get giddy, for that’s not the total score. In December 2007, when Wall Street’s reckless greed crashed our economy, the unemployment rate stood at only 5 percent (pdf), the average length of being unemployed was half of today’s, and far fewer people were forced into part-time work or had to find multiple jobs to make ends meet. [..]
But there’s an even more telling statistic that we rarely hear about: the employment/population ratio. This indicator tells us the number of working-age adults actually in the workforce, meaning they’re employed at least part-time or are looking for jobs.
This important number has plummeted by five million people since the crash. They’re not working, and they’re not counted as unemployed.
Robert Kuttner: Time to Thank Edward Snowden
When Edward Snowden first leaked massive NSA files to the Guardian newspaper, public reaction was mixed. To some, he had arrogated to himself a decision to make public some of the most sensitive national security secrets, damaging America’s ability to track terrorists, a decision that he had no right to make. People questioned his mental stability and his motives. To others, he had forced a submerged national debate and slowed down a secret and inexorable slide to a police state that protects security by routinely monitoring everybody. [..]
What Snowden has done is to force a long repressed debate about how much liberty, if any, we need to sacrifice in order to protect our security. Before his leaks, that urgent conversation was a non-debate because the violations of liberty were being done entirely in secret, beyond the reach of democratic deliberation. Even Republican Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, a key author of the Patriot Act, was appalled. He wrote to Attorney General Eric Holder: “I am extremely troubled by the FBI’s interpretation of this legislation … Seizing phone records of millions of innocent people is excessive and un-American.”
Dean Baker: Robert Rubin Wants to Redistribute More Income Upward
Along with Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin is the person most responsible for the country’s economic downturn. He helped steer the country on a path of bubble-driven growth and massive trade deficits. The latter was the result of the IMF engineered bailout from the East Asian financial crisis. The outcome of this bailout was a rush by developing countries to accumulate dollar reserves in order never to have to be in the situation that the East Asian countries faced in dealing with the IMF. This sent the dollar soaring, making U.S. goods and services uncompetitive internationally, causing the trade deficit to explode.
The lost demand from the trade deficit was offset in the 1990s by the stock bubble. The wealth created by the bubble led to a boom in consumption. Also, the ability for hare-brained Internet start-ups to raise billions by issuing stock led to an investment boom in hare-brained Internet start-ups. The bursting of the stock bubble gave us the longest period without job growth since the Great Depression. However the economy did eventually recover on the back of the housing bubble. The collapse of that bubble has given us an even longer stretch without job growth, ruined millions of lives, and will likely cost us tens of trillions of dollars in lost output.
Robert Reich: Pragmatists, Ideologues, and Inequality in America
How will the 2016 election be framed? What will be America’s choice?
If the coverage of last week’s two big winners offers a guide, the choice will be between “pragmatism” and “ideology.” [..]
But these appellations ignore what’s happening to an America in which almost all the economic gains are going to the richest 1 percent, median household incomes continues to drop, and the number of Americans in poverty continues to rise.
E. J. Dionne, Jr.: What’s the matter with motherhood?
If you’re a conservative strongly opposed to abortion, shouldn’t you want to give all the help you can to women who want to bring their children into the world? In particular, wouldn’t you hope they’d get the proper medical attention during and after their pregnancy?
This would seem a safe assumption, which is why it ought to be astonishing that conservatives are positively obsessed with trashing the Affordable Care Act’s regulation requiring insurance policies to include maternity coverage.
Never mind that we who are lucky enough to have health insurance end up paying to cover conditions we may never suffer ourselves. We all want to avoid cancer, but we don’t begrudge those who do get it when the premiums we pay into our shared insurance pools help them receive care.
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