“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: Using the Fed and trade to make the rich richer
There are two obvious ways to reduce inequality, but – surprise – The Washington Post editorial page is against them
One of the greatest scenes in movie history occurs at the end of “Casablanca.” Rick Blaine, played by Humphrey Bogart, is standing over the Gestapo major’s body with a smoking gun. When the police drive up, the French captain announces that the major has been shot and orders his men to “round up the usual suspects.”
Nearly all Democrats, and even many Republicans – including potential presidential candidates Sens. Rand Paul, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio – now agree that inequality is a serious problem. They all profess to be struggling to find ways to address the problem. They spout the usual lines about their pet theories: lack of education and skills among the workforce, robots making workers obsolete and the increasing number of children raised in single-parent families.
Yet they will likely stand by and watch as government takes two obvious steps that will increase inequality: the Fed’s raising of interest rates and the signing of free trade deals. While these policies go into effect, which are designed to redistribute income upward, we can count on our political leaders to ignore these smoking guns and round up their usual suspects.
New York Times Editorial Board: Gen. Petraeus’s Light Punishment
Granted, Americans love a comeback story.
But it is astonishing how quickly David Petraeus seems to have bounced back from the sordid aftermath of his extramarital affair, which cost him his job running the Central Intelligence Agency and added a rap sheet to the carefully managed legacy of the most famous American general of his generation.
Compared with the Obama administration’s aggressive prosecution of whistle-blowers and other leakers of classified information, Mr. Petraeus stands to emerge largely unscathed despite the extraordinarily poor judgment he showed while serving in one of the nation’s most critical national security jobs.
Abbe Lowell, an attorney for Stephen Kim, a former State Department contractor serving a 13-month term for leaking information about North Korea to Fox News, complained in a letter to the Department of Justice that the disposition in Mr. Petraeus’s case showed a “profound double standard.”
New report represents first effort to measure flow of taxpayer money flowing into company coffers
How much welfare Uncle Sam provides companies has long been one of the great mysteries of taxpayer spending. Like a secret underground river, boodles have flowed out of the Treasury and into corporate bank accounts without notice.
Now we finally have a first look at the size of that river and where the cash goes.
The federal government has quietly doled out $68 billion through 137 government giveaway programs since 2000, according to a new database built by a nonprofit research organization, Good Jobs First. It identified more than 164,000 gifts of taxpayer money to companies. You can look up company names, subsidy programs and other freebies at the Subsidy Tracker 3.0 website.
A report the organization released today, “Uncle Sam’s Favorite Corporations,” shows that big businesses raked in two-thirds of the welfare.
The most surprising and tantalizing finding is the identity of the biggest known recipient of federal welfare. That dubious honor belongs to Iberdrola, a Spanish energy company with a reputation for awful service and admissions of incompetence. It collected $2.1 billion of welfare on a $5.4 billion investment in U.S. wind farms from coast to coast.
Robert Reich: The “iEverything” and the Redistributional Imperative
It’s now possible to sell a new product to hundreds of millions of people without needing many, if any, workers to produce or distribute it.
At its prime in 1988, Kodak, the iconic American photography company, had 145,000 employees. In 2012, Kodak filed for bankruptcy.
The same year Kodak went under, Instagram, the world’s newest photo company, had 13 employees serving 30 million customers.
The ratio of producers to customers continues to plummet. When Facebook purchased “WhatsApp” (the messaging app) for $19 billion last year, WhatsApp had 55 employees serving 450 million customers.
A friend, operating from his home in Tucson, recently invented a machine that can find particles of certain elements in the air.
He’s already sold hundreds of these machines over the Internet to customers all over the world. He’s manufacturing them in his garage with a 3D printer.
So far, his entire business depends on just one person — himself.
New technologies aren’t just labor-replacing. They’re also knowledge-replacing.
Sean McElwee: If everyone voted, progressives would win
The best way to create a progressive America is voting reform
In preparation for the 2016 presidential election, Democrats appear united around one candidate, while the Republican contest remains far from secured. Many on the left, who view Hillary Clinton’s stances as a tame brand of liberalism, have attempted to draft Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., to run. But the progressives do not need a charismatic leader. Instead, they need to invest in unleashing the disgruntled progressive majority. A longer-term strategy for progressives should be to strengthen unions and boost turnout among politically marginalized populations.
“If everybody in this country voted,” the economist John Kenneth Galbraith said, “the Democrats would be in for the next 100 years.” There is strong evidence to support his claim. A 2007 study by Jan Leighley and Jonathan Nagler found that nonvoters are more economically liberal than voters, preferring government health insurance, easier union organizing and more federal spending on schools. Nonvoters preferred Barack Obama to Mitt Romney by 59 percent to 24 percent, while likely voters were split 47 percent for each, according to a 2012 Pew Research Center poll. Nonvoters are far less likely to identify as Republican, and voters tend to be more opposed to redistribution than nonvoters.
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