“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: The Long-Run Cop-Out
On Monday, President Obama will call for a significant increase in spending, reversing the harsh cuts of the past few years. He won’t get all he’s asking for, but it’s a move in the right direction. And it also marks a welcome shift in the discourse. Maybe Washington is starting to get over its narrow-minded, irresponsible obsession with long-run problems and will finally take on the hard issue of short-run gratification instead.
O.K., I’m being flip to get your attention. I am, however, quite serious. It’s often said that the problem with policy makers is that they’re too focused on the next election, that they look for short-term fixes while ignoring the long run. But the story of economic policy and discourse these past five years has been exactly the opposite.
Robert Kuttner: America Should Send More People to Prison
You know the statistic. We incarcerate a higher proportion of the population than any other country does. Russia and South Africa rank respectively second and third.
Hundreds of thousands of young, now aging, men, are doing hard time for possession of small amounts of drugs. More and more people find themselves in jail because they got caught with bench warrants for their arrest for exorbitant fines they could not afford to pay. More than a century after debtors prisons were abolished, thousands are again behind bars because of debts.
But one category of felon is free on the street. I refer, of course, to corporate criminals.
‘Grexit’ leverage could help country stay in the eurozone with better treatment
Every fan of the market knows the importance of exit. If your breakfast cereal is too bland, you can buy a different brand of cereal. If your barber charges too much, you can look for a new barber who will charge less. The option to leave is crucial since it forces the cereal producer and the barber to try to please their customers in order to keep them.
The same logic applies to Greece’s position in the euro. The country’s newly elected Syriza-led government intends to press the European Union (EU) for concessions that will allow it to restart its economy. The policies that have been imposed by the EU on Greece since the crisis could win a Nobel Prize for economic mismanagement. [..]
Since Greece has a trade surplus, it already doesn’t need to borrow to finance essential imports. (The recent plunge in oil prices could save Greece $9 billion a year, or close to 4 percent of GDP.) The drop in the drachma relative to the euro will further improve its trade position, leading to a boost in net exports and a sharp upturn in employment. It is certainly plausible that Greece’s economy will in very short order make up the ground lost to an initial period of instability and then continue on a path of robust growth.
This is where the EU has inadvertently done Greece a favor. It has damaged Greece’s economy and society so severely that the disruptions caused by leaving the euro are likely to seem minor by comparison.
Joseph Hickman: To be commander at Gitmo, no experience necessary
No one in charge of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility has had a background in detention. Why?
Thirteen years ago, the United States started bringing detainees that were captured in the global war on terror to its detention facility in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Nine months after the first detainees arrived at Guantánamo, the Department of Defense (DoD) created the “Joint Task Force Guantanamo” (JTF-GTMO). Their stated mission is to maintain safe, humane, legal and transparent detention operations.
In the intervening years, detainees and human rights watchdog groups, have filed hundreds of complaints and allegations of mistreatment and abuse against JTF-GTMO. Since its inception, eleven commanders have led JTF-GTMO. Those commanders are responsible for creating, approving and ensuring the enforcement of all operational procedures for the guard force, and for the proper care and wellbeing of the detainees.
Yet, of the eleven JTF-GTMO commanders, not a single one had any experience or training in detention operations prior to arriving at Guantánamo.
Zoë Carpenter: The Main Problem With Obama’s Climate Policy? It Makes No Sense
Not for the first time, the Obama administration is offering doublespeak when it comes to energy and the environment. On Sunday the White House announced its intention to designate more than 12 million acres in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as Wilderness, which would put the area permanently off limits to oil and gas drilling. “Obama’s Arctic Power Grab,” is how Politico described the move, framing it as a sign of “Obama’s shift to the left on environmental issues.” Oil executives and Alaskan politicians responded with apocryphal statements. Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski, who chairs the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, went so far as to claim that Obama had “effectively declared war on Alaska.”
Two days later the administration unveiled a five-year plan that would open up a vast new stretch of ocean off the coast of Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia to oil and gas drilling, and sell new leases for drilling in the Arctic. More than 3 billion barrels of oil await the drilling rigs on the outer continental shelf of the Atlantic, according to estimates from the early 1980s. The New York Times reports that the reserves could be even greater. “This is a balanced proposal that would make available nearly 80 percent of the undiscovered technically recoverable resources, while protecting areas that are simply too special to develop,” Interior Secretary Sally Jewell said in a statement.
Let’s hear that again: the Obama administration proposes to open up nearly 80 percent of the nation’s untapped offshore oil and gas reserves by 2022. The sick irony of that figure is that 80 percent also happens to be the proportion of proven fossil-fuel reserves that must stay in the ground in order to avoid the extremely unpleasant effects of more than 2 degrees Celsius of global warming.
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