“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: Time to tax Wall Street
Horror stories of obnoxious investment bankers should make the public scream, ‘Enough!’
Many people already had low opinions of the Wall Street elite. I’m referring to the investment-banker types who get incredibly rich through financial manipulations, government bailouts and implicit government guarantees provided for too-big-to-fail banks. But a recent New York magazine piece showed that even the most jaded were being too generous in their assessment of this gang.
Kevin Roose, who was working as a New York Times reporter at the time, managed to infiltrate a black-tie party at the St. Regis Hotel sponsored by a secret Wall Street fraternity. The so-called Kappa Beta Phi (the reverse of Phi Beta Kappa, the academic honor society) was not made up of a bunch of college kids or recent grads. It featured many of the leading figures on Wall Street – multimillionaires and billionaires, all of whom were well past the age at which we expect people to start being responsible for their actions. [..]
The anger prompted by Roose’s account makes this a great time to bring back the idea of taxing their speculation. While Dodd-Frank reforms will curb some of the worst abuses, the Wall Streeters are still making huge fortunes shuffling money rather than doing anything productive. A modest tax can raise a huge amount of money for productive ends, such as infrastructure and education, while making shuffling money a bit less profitable.
David Cay Johnston: The shocking numbers behind corporate welfare
Boeing and its stockholders fly high on tax dollars
State and local governments have awarded at least $110 billion in taxpayer subsidies to business, with 3 of every 4 dollars going to fewer than 1,000 big corporations, the most thorough analysis to date of corporate welfare revealed today.
Boeing ranks first, with 137 subsidies totaling $13.2 billion, followed by Alcoa at $5.6 billion, Intel at $3.9 billion, General Motors at $3.5 billion and Ford Motor at $2.5 billion, the new report by the nonprofit research organization Good Jobs First shows.
Dow Chemical had the most subsidies, 410 totaling $1.4 billion, followed by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire-Hathaway holding company, with 310 valued at $1.1 billion.
The figures were compiled from disclosures made by state and local government agencies that subsidize companies in all sorts of ways, including cash giveaways, building and land transfers, tax abatements and steep discounts on electric and water bills.
In fact, the numbers significantly understate the true value of taxpayer subsidies to businesses, for reasons explained below.
The nation has been treated to a sneak preview of President Obama’s 2015 budget, scheduled to be released next Tuesday. As we asked in Part 1 of this two-part budget update, that’s an occasion for reflecting on the nature of a White House budget. Is it a negotiating document? A vision statement? A “political treatise”? [..]
We’ve been given no indication that the president or his advisers understand what a grave mistake it was to embrace the deficit-cutting rhetoric of the right, to appoint austerians to lead a Presidential Deficit Commission, or of extending the austerity framework even to programs like Social Security (which does not contribute to the federal deficit).
Instead we’re being told that the president’s plan spending increases (more about those in a moment) are “fully paid for,” a phrase which suggests that austerity’s ghost still lingers.
Eugene Robinson: GOP Crocodile Tears Over Jobs
At the risk of repeating myself, the federal minimum wage is far too low and needs to be raised. Republicans who claim to be worried about lost jobs can dry their crocodile tears, because a few simple measures would get all those jobs back-and lots more.
It has been amusing to watch GOP grandees try to paint themselves as champions of the working stiff. This new appreciation for the struggles of low-wage earners was prompted by a report from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which estimates that raising the minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10, as President Obama proposes, would result in the loss of 500,000 jobs. [..]
Maybe we should all take a deep breath and look at the big picture. The purpose of raising the minimum wage is to give those at the bottom of the pay scale something that more closely approximates a living wage. It strikes me as obscene for conservatives to prattle on about the “dignity of work” when workers can toil long and hard in full-time jobs and yet their families can still be poor and in need of government assistance.
Sarah Anderson: Without any Grassroots, This Austerity Group Withered
The American people know a fake when they see it.
The austerity mania that plagued our political system for four years is finally subsiding. The latest sign is President Barack Obama’s decision to nix the Social Security cuts he had previously included in his budget proposal.
This was a body blow to the most powerful pro-austerity force in Washington – the Fix the Debt campaign. Starting in 2012, this fake grassroots – or “astroturf” – organization had deployed more than 100 CEOs to try to persuade the nation that our economic survival depended on expanding tax breaks for big corporations and slashing earned benefit programs.
Fix the Debt once boasted a budget of $40 million. Today, it’s shedding staff and going into hibernation, having failed to win any of their top priorities.
Sam Pizzigati: The Mess on Our ‘Information Superhighway’
Why should moving data around be any different from moving people? No private party ought to be getting rich off a basic public trust.
Back in the early 1990s, the infancy of the Internet Age, our hippest policy wonks orated endlessly about the emerging “information superhighway.”
But that mouthful of a moniker would soon fall out of fashion. Anyone today who talks “information superhighway” comes across as hopelessly uncool. The irony here? If we still talked about the Internet as a “superhighway,” maybe we wouldn’t find ourselves in the online mess that [now envelops v] us.
Americans currently pay much more for Internet than just about everybody else in the developed world. Other countries have established [fast, cheap Internet access v] as a given of modern life. In the United States, we surf the Net at Model-T speeds – and tens of millions of Americans still have no broadband access at all.
This pitiful situation may soon get worse. Two corporate giants that share significant responsibility for our current digital state of affairs, Comcast and Time Warner, are now seeking regulatory approval for a $45 billion merger that would leave Comcast controlling the bulk of the nation’s broadband access.
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