“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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Yanis Varoufakis: Angela Merkel has a red and a yellow button. One ends the crisis. Which does she push?
It is quite obvious that the insolvency of Madrid and Rome had nothing to do with fiscal profligacy (recall that Spain had a lower debt than Germany in 2008 and Italy has consistently smaller budget deficits) and everything to do with the way in which the eurozone’s macroeconomy relied significantly for the demand of its net exports on the Global Minotaur. Once the latter keeled over in 2008, and Wall Street’s private cash disappeared, two effects brought Europe to its knees.
One was the sequential death-embrace of bankrupt banks and insolvent states (beginning with Greece, moving to Ireland, to Portugal and continuing until Italy and Spain were torn asunder). The other was the Minotaur’s simulacrum and its determination to hang on to its option of exiting the eurozone at will, therefore denying each and every rational plan for mending the currency union in a sustainable manner.
The telling question thus becomes: why such resistance, particularly from Germany, to every idea that would end the euro crisis? The standard answer is that Germany does not wish to pay for the debts of the periphery and will resist all federal-like moves (eg a banking or a fiscal union) until it is convinced that its partners will behave responsibly with their German-backed finances. While this captures well the mindset of many northern Europeans, it is beside the point. Consider the following mental experiment, which, I believe, helps us unveil a deeper motive.
Trevor Timm: Our media’s Isis threat hype machine: government stenography at its worst
If you turned on US cable news at any point last week, you might have thought this July 4 holiday would be our last weekend on earth – the supposed terrorist masterminds in Isis and their alleged vast sleeper cell army were going to descend upon America like the aliens in Independence Day and destroy us all.
CNN has led the pack in whipping Americans into a panic over the Isis threat, running story after story with government officials and terrorism industry money-makers hyping the threat, played against the backdrop of scary b-roll of terrorist training camps. Former CIA deputy director Mike Morell ominously told CBS last week that “I wouldn’t be surprised if we weren’t sitting here a week from today talking about an attack over the weekend in the United States.” MSNBC and Fox joined in too, using graphics and maps right out of Stephen Colbert’s satirical “Doom Bunker,” suggesting World War III was just on the verge of reaching America’s shores.
Nothing happened, of course. But it was an abject lesson in how irrational government fear-mongering still controls our public discourse, even when there wasn’t a shred of hard evidence for any sort of attack, only a feeling that one might happen.
For decades the idea of a financial transactions tax (FTT), in effect a modest sales tax on stock, bonds, derivatives and other financial assets, has been a fringe idea pursued by a small group of progressive politicians. While the concept had drawn the interest of many of the world’s most prominent economists, including former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, and Nobel laureates Joe Stiglitz, James Tobin, and Paul Krugman, few political figures in the United States were willing to go near an FTT. That situation is changing.
The latest news in this area is the release of a report last week on financial transactions taxes from the Tax Policy Center (TPC), a joint project of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute. The report assessed the potential revenue and the burden by income group from a FTT. This report, while not providing an endorsement of FTT, provides further support to an FTT as a serious policy.
This is an important development because the TPC has developed a strong reputation in policy circles as a reliable source for non-partisan analysis. For this reason, a report from the TPC can be seen as comparable to a report from the Congressional Budget Office. The center exists to analyze policy, not to advocate for it.
Wendell Potter: Coming Health Insurer Mergers Will Costs Consumers — and Jobs
The number of health insurers competing for your business almost certainly will decrease in coming months as the big for-profit firms merge or acquire each other. The companies insist that the results will enable them to operate more efficiently through the elimination of redundancies. But don’t expect your premiums to go down when the dust settles. In fact, if the past is prologue, premiums will go up.
The biggest beneficiaries will be the shareholders and a handful of top executives; they’ll make tens of millions of dollars on the day the transactions become final. Among the losers–in addition to the people enrolled in the insurers’ health plans–will be many of the employees of the acquired companies, and taxpayers in the cities that come out on the short end of the stick when the combined companies decide where the corporate headquarters will be. [..]
We’ve seen this movie before, and the ending can be predicted with some certainty. In almost every case, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
David Cay Johnston: Atlantic City’s downfall provides lessons for the nation
Nearly four decades ago, herds of buses began thundering down the highway to Atlantic City, where in windowless factories built next to the sea, paper and plastic were extracted from leather wallets. [..]
Atlantic City gambled away its future by failing to develop its natural advantages, failing to think long term and failing to invest its windfall strategically. This should be a lesson for the rest of America.
Across the country, thousands of so-called economic development agencies are throwing tens of billions of dollars each year at corporations, often without evidence they created or even saved a single job.
Every taxpayer should be asking, What is the strategy? Unless taxpayers demand a disciplined and strategic vision, their results will follow the tragedy of Atlantic City. When the inevitable economic storms come, the sandy foundations of their local economies will wash away.
Paul Buchheit: Growing Evidence that Charter Schools Are Failing
In early 2015 Stanford University’s updated CREDO Report concluded that “urban charter schools in the aggregate provide significantly higher levels of annual growth in both math and reading compared to their TPS peers.”
This single claim of success has a lot of people believing that charter schools really work. But there are good reasons to be skeptical. First of all, CREDO is funded and managed by reform advocates. It’s part of the Hoover Institution, aconservative and pro-business think tank funded in part by the Walton Foundation, and in partnership with Pearson, a leading developer of standardized testing materials. CREDO director Margaret Raymond is pro-charter and a free-market advocate. [..]
The inadequacies of charter schools have been confirmed by other recent studies, one of them by CREDO itself, which found that in comparison to traditional public schools “students in Ohio charter schools perform worse in both reading and mathematics.” Another recent CREDO study of California schools reached mixed results, with charters showing higher scores in reading but lower scores in math.
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