“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: Trade and Trust
One of the Obama administration’s underrated virtues is its intellectual honesty. Yes, Republicans see deception and sinister ulterior motives everywhere, but they’re just projecting. The truth is that, in the policy areas I follow, this White House has been remarkably clear and straightforward about what it’s doing and why.
Every area, that is, except one: international trade and investment.
I don’t know why the president has chosen to make the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership such a policy priority. Still, there is an argument to be made for such a deal, and some reasonable, well-intentioned people are supporting the initiative.
But other reasonable, well-intentioned people have serious questions about what’s going on. And I would have expected a good-faith effort to answer those questions. Unfortunately, that’s not at all what has been happening. Instead, the selling of the 12-nation Pacific Rim pact has the feel of a snow job. Officials have evaded the main concerns about the content of a potential deal; they’ve belittled and dismissed the critics; and they’ve made blithe assurances that turn out not to be true.
New York Times Editorial Board: Rand Paul’s Timely Takedown of the Patriot Act
He may have annoyed Senate colleagues by seizing the floor for a marathon monologue on Wednesday, but Senator Rand Paul did Americans a singular service by forcing attention to the fact that their civil liberties remain at stake as Congress drifts toward a renewal of the Patriot Act that is likely to do too little to rein in government surveillance programs.
“Are you really willing to give up your liberty for security?” Senator Paul asked in his unexpected, 10-and-a-half-hour quasi-filibuster.
The Kentucky lawmaker candidly linked his floor speech to his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, where he is determined to make more of a public issue of government intrusion into the private lives of Americans after the 9/11 attacks. This is to be welcomed, particularly since so many of his rivals prefer to slide off the issue by endorsing a compromised and faulty renewal of the Patriot Act as it expires on June 1.
Two years ago, my colleague David Rosnick put out a paper that analyzed the impact of recent patterns in trade, based on research showing that trade both tended to promote growth but also worsen inequality by reducing wages for those at the middle and bottom of the wage distribution. The paper concluded that for large segments of the workforce, the inequality effect exceeded any benefits from overall growth, making them net losers from growth.
This paper was cited in a recent Hill [column by Raoul Lowery Contreras, who pronounced it “baloney.”
This is characteristic of the sorts of arguments that we are getting in favor of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) as its proponents apparently fear they lack the votes to get the necessary fast-track authority through Congress.
Note the nature of Contreras’ argument. He didn’t challenge the research Rosnick used as the basis for his analysis, nor did he show that Rosnick had done his calculations incorrectly. He just denounced it because he apparently doesn’t like the conclusion. [..]
There are some very serious arguments against the TPP. It’s not surprising that TPP proponents would prefer to call people names rather than engage in debate on the deal.
Steven W. Thrasher: ‘Fight for $15’ will ease economic inequality. But could it end police violence too?
The Fight for $15 movement is spreading. Seattle, San Francisco and now Los Angeles have adopted plans to make $15 the minimum wage. The effort to roughly double the federal minimum wage will greatly ease economic inequality, but it can do more than that: it can also keep citizens from being killed by the police.
As we have seen in grisly police murder after murder over the past year, a great deal of police violence happens when officers encounter men engaging in the informal economy. This is particularly true when black men (locked out of the formal economy pretty much since slavery, through one trick or another) turn to the informal economy to get by. It was while Eric Garner, father of six, was illegally selling loose cigarettes that he was choked in a homicide by NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo.
By paying workers $15 an hour, we could give poor people access to enough money to live, disincentivizing the informal economy. A young man is less likely to sell loosies if working at McDonald’s pays him enough to support his family. And such a wage increase won’t cause anyone to lose their jobs, either: according to the United States Department of Labor: “A review of 64 studies on minimum wage increases found no discernable effect on employment.”
Paying workers $15 an hour would also give police one less reason to harass citizens.
John Nichols: How Defunding Derails Our Infrastructure
John Boehner claims public financing had nothing to do with the Amtrak disaster, but like so many others, it can be directly traced to funding shortfalls.
House Speaker John Boehner blew a gasket when a reporter asked him whether the Republicans’ refusal to adequately fund Amtrak might have played a role in the May 12 derailment of a Northeast Corridor train that killed eight people and injured more than 200.
“Are you really gonna ask such a stupid question? Listen, you know, they started this yesterday: ‘It’s all about funding. It’s all about funding.’ Well, obviously, it’s not about funding,” Boehner whined, before seizing on reports that the train “was going twice the speed limit” as it entered a turn in Philadelphia.
Boehner’s crude blame-laying didn’t seem very smart after it was reported later in the day that final implementation of a safety system to automatically slow down speeding trains had been delayed by budget shortfalls, bureaucracy, and the general absence of urgency with which official Washington greets even the most vital demands for infrastructure investment. The New York Times reported that the Federal Railroad Administration’s request for safety-technology funding “was ignored” by Congress. “Clearly, one of the hurdles that Amtrak has and the commuter rail industry has is that this is very expensive technology,” explained former FRA administrator Joseph Szabo. “It was never funded. The failure to invest in Amtrak’s capital program clearly has been a hindrance in more timely deployment. The way to make public rail a priority would be with public funding.”
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