“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 Not-So-Bad Economy
According to the economist Kevin O’Rourke, who has been doing a running comparison between the Great Depression that began in 1929 and the Great Recession that began almost eight years ago, the world has just passed a sad landmark. While the initial slump this time around wasn’t nearly as bad as the collapse from 1929 to 1933, the recovery has been much weaker — and at this point world industrial production is doing worse than it did at the same point in the 1930s. A remarkable achievement!
But the bad news is unevenly distributed. In particular, Europe has done very badly, while America has done relatively well. True, U.S. performance looks good only if you grade on a curve. Still, unemployment has been cut in half, and the Federal Reserve is getting ready to raise interest rates at a time when its counterpart, the European Central Bank, is still desperately seeking ways to boost spending.
Now, I believe that the Fed is making a mistake. But the fact that hiking rates is even halfway defensible is a sign that the U.S. economy isn’t doing too badly. So what did we do right?
Trevor Timm: It’s messed up for Democrats to use the no-fly list to push for gun laws
In the wake of yet another mass shooting in the US, Republicans managed to vote down a bill that would bar people on the no-fly list from buying guns. It’s hard to tell what is more sickening: that Republicans will refuse to vote for literally any gun control legislation despite the country’s mass-murder epidemic, or that Democrats are trying to use the unconstitutional no-fly list, which makes a mockery of due process, to force the issue.
“People have due process rights in this country,” Republican House speaker Paul Ryan said in explaining his party’s opposition to the vote, apparently with a straight face. He went on to say there shouldn’t be a rush to pass legislation at the risk of “infringing upon the rights of law-abiding citizens,” which in almost all other situations is the party’s modus operandi.
Funny, I don’t remember hearing a word of protest from party leaders when tens of thousands of people were added to the list and barred from flying during the Bush years – and in fact, they were loudly cheering as the Bush administration tore down all sorts of due process rights in the aftermath of 9/11.
Steven W, Thrasher: Income inequality happens by design. We can’t fix it by tweaking capitalism
The economic hoarding by those at the top has been termed “income inequality”, but that’s neither a strong nor accurate enough phrasing. I have never heard poor people complain about “income inequality”; poor people complain about being screwed out of housing , or about working more hours for less pay or about having to choose between medicine and food.
“Inequality” sounds like something that happens by accident and can be remedied by fiddling around the edges. It is not as if the rich are a little more equal and the poor a little less equal, and if we shift a bit we’ll all come out in the middle. What we’ve been calling “income inequality” might be better understood as a war waged by US political and economic policy on the poor. [..]
The disparities in wealth that we term “income inequality” are no accident, and they can’t be fixed by fiddling at the edges of our current economic system. These disparities happened by design, and the system structurally disadvantages those at the bottom. The poorest Americans have no realistic hope of achieving anything that approaches income equality; even their very chances for access to the most basic tools of life are almost nil.
President Lyndon Johnson’s so-called War on Poverty didn’t angle to take anything from the rich so that the poor could see equality. It was designed to keep some of the poor just alive enough that they wouldn’t rebel, and designed to let other poor people perish as an object lesson to the rest of us to keep scampering.
Robert Reich: What to Do About Disloyal Corporations
Just like that, Pfizer has decided it’s no longer American. It plans to link up with Ireland’s Allergan and move its corporate headquarters from New York to Ireland.
That way it will pay less tax. Ireland’s tax rate is less than half that of United States. Ian Read, Pfizer’s chief executive, told the Wall Street Journal the higher tax rate in the United States caused Pfizer to compete “with one hand tied behind our back.”
Read said he’d tried to lobby Congress to reduce the corporate tax rate (now 35 percent) but failed, so Pfizer is leaving.
Such corporate desertions from the United States (technically called “tax inversions”) will cost the rest of us taxpayers some $19.5 billion over the next decade, estimates Congress’ joint committee on taxation.
Which is fueling demands from Republicans to lower the corporate tax rate.
Bill Moyers and Michael Winship: GOP enters the abyss: The entire party has fallen prey to bigotry and paranoid fantasy
For reasons hard to fathom, the Republicans seem to have made up their minds: they will divide, degrade and secede from the Union.
They will do so with bullying, lies and manipulation, a willingness to say anything, no matter how daft or wrong. They will do so by spending unheard of sums to buy elections with the happy assistance of big business and wealthy patrons for whom the joys of gross income inequality are a comfortable fact of life. By gerrymandering and denying the vote to as many of the poor, the elderly, struggling low-paid workers, and people of color as they can. And by appealing to the basest impulses of human nature: anger, fear and bigotry.
Turn on your TV or computer, pick up a paper or magazine and you can see and hear them baying at the moon. Donald Trump is just the most outrageous and bigmouthed of the frothing wolf pack of deniers and truth benders. As our friend and colleague Tom Engelhardt of TomDispatch writes, “There’s nothing, no matter how jingoistic or xenophobic, extreme or warlike that can’t be expressed in public and with pride by a Republican presidential candidate.”
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