“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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Joseph E. Stiglitz: Don’t Trade Away Our Health
A secretive group met behind closed doors in New York this week. What they decided may lead to higher drug prices for you and hundreds of millions around the world.
Representatives from the United States and 11 other Pacific Rim countries convened to decide the future of their trade relations in the so-called Trans-Pacific Partnership (T.P.P.). Powerful companies appear to have been given influence over the proceedings, even as full access is withheld from many government officials from the partnership countries.
Among the topics negotiators have considered are some of the most contentious T.P.P. provisions – those relating to intellectual property rights. And we’re not talking just about music downloads and pirated DVDs. These rules could help big pharmaceutical companies maintain or increase their monopoly profits on brand-name drugs.
Dean Baker: Is Hillary Clinton in the Bottom 3 Percent? Turning the Corner on CEO Pay
Most of the people who have direct dealings with the former secretary of state seem to regard her very highly, certainly not in the bottom 3 percent of the population. The same could be said about former Florida governor and likely presidential candidate Jeb Bush. Erskine Bowles, the former Clinton chief of staff and patron saint of the deficit hawks, also would not usually be put in the bottom 3 percent. [..]
This is not a job where poor performance carries much of a price. Erskine Bowles was on the board of Morgan Stanley in 2008, when the Fed had to turn it into a bank holding company on an emergency basis to save it from bankruptcy. Bowles is still there today as the lead director.
The reason that the rest of us should care about corporate directors is that these are the people who determine the pay of corporate CEOs. As CEO pay has rocketed from being 20 to 30 times as much as the pay of an ordinary worker back in the 1970s to being 200 or 300 times as much today, it was the corporate directors who signed the contracts. They were the ones who said it was necessary to keep giving CEOs ever higher pay, ostensibly in the interests of the shareholders.
It’s not just that anti-vaccination is selfish. It’s selfishness for its own sake, a way for snobs to distinguish themselves from the vaccinating masses. Anti-vaccination is tailormade for deeply selfish people, because it gives them a chance to show off how superior they think they are while shifting the cost of their choice on other people, from their own children to the beleaguered school officials and pediatricians who have to deal with them.
But what if we changed the equation, so that parents could not shift all the costs for their choice onto others? The easiest and most straightforward way to do that would be to start fining parents who don’t vaccinate, with exceptions for the few that have immune-suppressed kids who can’t handle it. It’s the only thing that actually addresses the deep selfishness at the heart of anti-vaccination. Appealing to the common good won’t work, since they think they are better than common. Appealing to their own pocketbooks, on the other hand, might just work.
Considering that anti-vaccination is primarily a matter of elite people showing off their elite status through anti-vaccination, the fine can’t be small or they’ll just see it as the price of doing business. Perhaps $5,000, per kid, per year the kids aren’t vaccinated. The money can go toward paying for public health initiatives for people who would kill to have the access to healthcare that anti-vaccination people turn their noses up to. Not only would that actually help people, but it would highlight some of the unspoken classism underlying the anti-vaccination movement. I realize that just straight-up fining people is politically unpopular in our era of soft
Robert Reich: Welcome to the Share-the-Scraps Economy
How would you like to live in an economy where robots do everything that can be predictably programmed in advance, and almost all profits go to the robots’ owners?
Meanwhile, human beings do the work that’s unpredictable – odd jobs, on-call projects, fetching and fixing, driving and delivering, tiny tasks needed at any and all hours – and patch together barely enough to live on.
Brace yourself. This is the economy we’re now barreling toward.
They’re Uber drivers, Instacart shoppers, and Airbnb hosts. They include Taskrabbit jobbers, Upcounsel’s on-demand attorneys, and Healthtap’s on-line doctors.
They’re Mechanical Turks.
The euphemism is the “share” economy. A more accurate term would be the “share-the-scraps” economy.
Michelangelo Signorile: Does Mike Huckabee Really Believe Serving Gays Is Like Forcing Jews to Sell ‘Bacon-Wrapped Shrimp’?
Just a week ago, Mormon church leaders held a scam of a press conference in which they claimed to support anti-discrimination protections for LGBT people, whom they agreed had been discriminated against for centuries. This was at first a shocker, because only seven years ago they urged church members to promote that very discrimination. They implored them to help stop gay marriage in another state, California, raising millions of dollars and sending missionaries door to door in California, telling people to vote for hate and pass Prop 8. And the leaders weren’t now offering an apology for that recent horrendous action. [..]
Mike Huckabee on Sunday spelled it out a bit more (though it’s still quite unclear), outlining the parameters of how this debate may take place among GOP potential presidential contenders. Speaking on CNN, he compared homosexuality to drinking, swearing or liking “classical music and ballet and opera.” As he explained it, these are all “lifestyles” and choices — the long-time anti-gay lie on homosexuality — and said that he has many friends who do or like those things, but they’re not his “cup of tea.” Protecting religious liberties thus means that Christians should not have to accept, or cater to, people whose choices are an affront to their faith.
And that’s when Huckabee defined a bit more just what safeguarding religious liberties means — and how Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio and others will have to address it. Amid the stories of bakers and florists turning away gay customers seeking services for their weddings, and for-profit wedding chapels refusing to marry gays, Huckabee, though he wasn’t very clear, seemed to be likening laws protecting gays in these businesses to forcing Jews to “serve bacon-wrapped shrimp in their deli.”
Will Rogers: Hiding in Plain Sight: America’s Most Effective Conservation Program
On Monday, the White House released its latest budget proposal, a thick and heavy document with hundreds of pages and hundreds of thousands of numbers detailing how the Obama Administration intends to spend almost $4 trillion in the year which begins next October 1.
Budget day is part of the ritual of Washington D.C., with supporters of the White House praising the president’s choices, and opponents criticizing them. That holds true regardless of which party controls the White House and Congress.
Buried in today’s budget is a plan to spend $900 million next year for a program which has been one of the most effective in the nation since it was created 50 years ago. It is the Land and Water Conservation Fund, often referred to inside the Beltway by its acronym — LWCF. And we strongly applaud the president’s recommendation and will be working to secure congressional approval.
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