“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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Eliot Ross: The referendum that reinvented Scotland
Even if Scots vote no, their politics have been transformed
Things move very quickly in politics, and old certainties can die suddenly. As a high school student in Edinburgh in the early 2000s, I was taught that the devolution of major government powers to a new Scottish parliament in 1999 was Tony Blair’s masterstroke. Scottish nationalism, I learned, no longer made sense. With devolution, the Scots got meaningful self-governance, while Blair’s “new” Labour Party could look forward to long periods of rule in Edinburgh and London.
This week’s independence referendum and the great surge of support for the yes campaign over the past year are exactly what Blair thought he had made impossible. [..]
An independent Scotland would be faced with great uncertainties, but the idea that continued union in the U.K. ensures a clear political future is hardly borne out by the U.K.’s volatile and uneven experience of postimperial statehood over the past 70 years. Just ask Blair. At one time he was certain he had settled the question of Scottish independence once and for all with devolution. Instead he turned out to have laid out the basis for a political earthquake.
David Cay Johnson: Tax cuts can do more harm than good
Their design is crucially important for predicting their effects
Tax cuts are the one guaranteed path to prosperity. Or so politicians have told Americans for so long that the claim has become a secular dogma.
But tax cuts can do more harm than good, a new report shows. It draws on decades of empirical evidence analyzed with standard economic principles used in business, academia and government.
What ultimately matters is the way a tax cut is structured and how it affects behavior. A well-designed tax cut can help increase future prosperity, but a poorly structured one can result in a meaner future with fewer jobs, less compensation and higher costs to society.
William G. Gale of the Brookings Institution, a nonprofit Washington policy research house, and Andrew Samwick, a Dartmouth College professor, last week issued the report, “Effects of Income Tax Changes on Economic Growth.”
Gale said he expects emailed brickbats from those who have incorporated the tax cut dogma into their views without really understanding the issue.
“The idea that tax cuts raise growth is repeated so often it is taken like a form of gospel,” Gale told me. “We are not buying into that gospel” because it fails to consider their total effects.
While 70 percent of Americans approve of corporal punishment, black Americans have a distinct history with the subject. Beating children has been a depressingly familiar habit in black families since our arrival in the New World. As the black psychiatrists William H. Grier and Price M. Cobbs wrote in “Black Rage,” their 1968 examination of psychological black life: “Beating in child-rearing actually has its psychological roots in slavery and even yet black parents will feel that, just as they have suffered beatings as children, so it is right that their children be so treated.”
The lash of the plantation overseer fell heavily on children to whip them into fear of white authority. Terror in the field often gave way to parents beating black children in the shack, or at times in the presence of the slave owner in forced cooperation to break a rebellious child’s spirit. Black parents beat their children to keep them from misbehaving in the eyes of whites who had the power to send black youth to their deaths for the slightest offense. Today, many black parents fear that a loose tongue or flash of temper could get their child killed by a trigger-happy cop. They would rather beat their offspring than bury them. [..]
Equally tragic is that those who are beaten become beaters too. And many black folks are reluctant to seek therapy for their troubles because they may be seen as spiritually or mentally weak. The pathology of beatings festers in the psychic wounds of black people that often go untreated in silence.
Rebecca Solnit: The Wheel Turns, the Boat Rocks, the Sea Rises
There have undoubtedly been stable periods in human history, but you and your parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents never lived through one, and neither will any children or grandchildren you may have or come to have. Everything has been changing continuously, profoundly — from the role of women to the nature of agriculture. For the past couple of hundred years, change has been accelerating in both magnificent and nightmarish ways.
Yet when we argue for change, notably changing our ways in response to climate change, we’re arguing against people who claim we’re disrupting a stable system. They insist that we’re rocking the boat unnecessarily.
I say: rock that boat. It’s a lifeboat; maybe the people in it will wake up and start rowing. Those who think they’re hanging onto a stable order are actually clinging to the wreckage of the old order, a ship already sinking, that we need to leave behind.
Oliver Burkeman: Corporations are not people, so don’t let them guilt you into tipping the maid
Gratitude is a very good thing. It makes us happy. But this is what happens when Marriott and the corporate do-gooder police co-opt your feelings
If I still somehow retained any capacity to be surprised by the tone-deafness of corporate America, I imagine I’d be pretty taken aback by the news that Marriott International has joined forces with a nonprofit called A Woman’s Nation to launch The Envelope Please, a campaign to encourage hotel guests to leave “tips and notes of thanks for hotel room attendants” in envelopes that Marriott will graciously provide. (You can contribute to Marriott’s marketing budget – sorry, I meant “donate to A Woman’s Nation”! – here.)
As New York magazine’s Annie Lowery and others have pointed out, tipping is a terrible way to try to improve the lot of hotel housekeepers, whose work is stressful, debilitating, unseen and badly paid. On the one hand, tipping is basically useless as a way of encouraging good work; on the other hand, it’s incredibly useful as an excuse for employers to avoid raising wages. In the words of the National Review – and how often does one quote the National Review approvingly when not under the influence of massive quantities of hallucinogenic drugs? – how about just paying them more?”
Emma Brockes: There is nothing more American than unlimited breadsticks
Forget those classist hedge-funders and their 300-page report on pasta water. What could be more authentically itself than Olive Garden?
I have been thinking about Olive Garden more than usual the past few days – specifically its breadsticks, which were singled out for abuse in a 300-page report written by one of the restaurant chain’s investors, a hedge-fund up in arms at the perceived waste of food (and trying to gain greater control of the parent company’s board).
It’s the breadsticks, along with the bottomless salad bowl, that have of course made the franchise famous, both for its generosity and as a symbol of the gluttony and excess laying waste to America. Olive Garden is the sort of restaurant that one loves as a child and should supposedly outgrow – but that kind of snobbery overlooks a fundamental fact about human nature: no one ever, ever outgrows a good salad bar (or hot breadsticks, for that matter). It would be like outgrowing the need for a hug.
So while debate this week has ostensibly surrounded the restaurant’s commercial efficiency, all anyone has really been wondering is this: is Olive Garden – and by extension a big slice of American restaurant culture in general – gross or not gross?
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