“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 Donald and the Decider
Almost six months have passed since Donald Trump overtook Jeb Bush in polls of Republican voters. At the time, most pundits dismissed the Trump phenomenon as a blip, predicting that voters would soon return to more conventional candidates. Instead, however, his lead just kept widening. Even more striking, the triumvirate of trash-talk — Mr. Trump, Ben Carson, and Ted Cruz — now commands the support of roughly 60 percent of the primary electorate.
But how can this be happening? After all, the antiestablishment candidates now dominating the field, aside from being deeply ignorant about policy, have a habit of making false claims, then refusing to acknowledge error. Why don’t Republican voters seem to care?
Well, part of the answer has to be that the party taught them not to care. Bluster and belligerence as substitutes for analysis, disdain for any kind of measured response, dismissal of inconvenient facts reported by the “liberal media” didn’t suddenly arrive on the Republican scene last summer. On the contrary, they have long been key elements of the party brand. So how are voters supposed to know where to draw the line?
Dean Baker: The Fed’s premature rate hike
The decision by the Federal Reserve Board to raise interest rates last week can be seen as a vote of confidence in the strength of the economy. Unfortunately, the Fed’s optimism doesn’t carry much sway with the economy. We are likely to see considerable weakness in the year ahead, with millions of people either unable to find full-time work and tens of millions unable to get the wage increases that would allow them to share in the gains from productivity growth.
To be clear, a rate hike of 0.25 percentage points is not a big deal. But its purpose and effect is to slow the economy and the rate of job creation. In spite of the enormous improvements in the economy over the last five years, the labor market by many measures, such as the percentage of people employed or the number of involuntary part-time workers, still looks like it’s in a recession. In this context, the Fed’s rate hike looks to be mistake.
Amy Altman and Tammy Duckworth: Seniors and Veterans Deserve a Raise
As any senior citizen can tell you, the cost of necessities like medical care, food, and prescription drugs rises every year. Our social security system provides an annual cost-of-living adjustment (“COLA”) so that beneficiaries are able to keep up with their increasing expenses. The COLA is intended to allow social security beneficiaries to tread water, and without them these already-modest benefits lose purchasing power, as the cost of living expenses increase each year.
That’s why it’s distressing that, because of outdated and inaccurate methodology that does not take into account rising costs for seniors, there will be no social security COLA — or COLA for several other programs including Veterans’ benefits–next year. So instead of treading water, our seniors and our Veterans will sink as the benefits they’ve relied on lose purchasing power.
Social security and veterans benefits are earned over a lifetime of hard work and sacrifice. We are among the wealthiest nations in the world at a time when top CEOs are seeing annual raises averaging 3.9 percent of their already-enormous compensation. If those top CEOs — whose pay before the raise averaged $16 million each — deserve a 3.9 percent increase, our seniors and Veterans do as well.
Mike Lux: What Are Democrats to Do?
I wanted to close my blogging for the year by looking at the big picture for the future of the Democratic party. The 2016 cycle feels like it started even earlier than usual, and not just because Donald Trump’s bloviating got the media so worked up so fast. The Republicans, following old Dick Nixon’s Southern strategy to its horrifically logical conclusion, have become the party of open racism and violence: as Karen Tumulty suggested in the Washington Post, Trump can’t go over the line because there are no lines, they’ve all been obliterated. And Democrats are still in a debate over how to respond to the increasing nastiness and cynicism of their opponents.
One camp believes everything is okay, at least in presidential years, because the demographic trends favor us and because the Republicans are so damn good at alienating people. Another camp thinks we need to panic because the numbers of Democratic elected officials are so low and Hillary has weaknesses as a candidate. Both of these scenarios have some truth in them, but they get some big stuff wrong too. Demographic trends do favor us, and the Republicans are driving many of the demographic groups in the new American majority our way, but unless we have a serious strategy for taking advantage of these trends, we can and will still lose the majority of elections — as we have been in startling numbers two of the last three cycles. But given that Democrats have won more votes for president in five of the last six presidential elections, and three of the last five elections in general, the panic thing seems a little far-fetched. More on this in a moment.
Robert Kuttner: A Big Win for Planned Parenthood
Little noticed in the deal that Congress approved Friday is the fact that the anti-abortion lobby got wiped out. The deal included no provisions cutting funding for Planned Parenthood — an issue on which Republicans have been prepared to shut down the government in past budget fights.
Nor did the anti-choice zealots have any success on their other proposed riders intended to reduce reproductive rights. There were proposed cuts in federal spending for sex education, family planning and Planned Parenthood.
Same with efforts to further restrict abortion rights in the name of religious freedom, or international family planning, or attempts to block the government from requiring multi-state plans to include the full range of family planning services.
What happened? First, the Democrats stood fast with reproductive rights groups.
Mark Rufalo: It’s time to transition to 100% clean energy: the wind is now at our backs
The climate agreement reached in Paris is provoking a flurry of caveats, criticisms and cautions. Many of those criticisms are warranted and there’s a lot of work ahead to make sure countries live up to their promises. But we should not miss a chance to celebrate a historic turning point.
World leaders finally made commitments to clean, renewable energy that will help to ensure a safer, healthier and more prosperous future for us all. The agreement signals that the age of fossil fuels is coming to a close, and the age of renewable energy is dawning.
In many ways, the Paris deal is the mother of all market signals. To deliver on the promises world leaders made, we will need to leave coal and oil in the ground and move toward a complete reliance on clean energy. Let’s not miss the writing on the wall: fossil fuels are a losing bet, while renewables offer economic opportunity.
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