“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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Trevor Timm: Apple’s Tim Cook defends encryption. When will other tech CEOs do so?
It seems everywhere he goes these days, Apple CEO Tim Cook is out there forcefully and publicly defending his company’s decision to provide iPhone users with end-to-end text messaging and FaceTime encryption to protect against the constant threat of criminal hackers and foreign governments. The question is: when will other tech company leaders follow his lead?
If we’re going to avoid having a horrible law banning encryption passed in the next year, more of the tech company giants’ high-profile representatives – the Mark Zuckerbergs, Marissa Mayers and Eric Schmidts – need to use their platforms as the world’s most well-known technology chiefs to make crystal clear how important encryption is to users everywhere.
Bernie Sanders: To Rein In Wall Street, Fix the Fed
Wall Street is still out of control. Seven years ago, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department bailed out the largest financial institutions in this country because they were considered too big to fail. But almost every one is bigger today than it was before the bailout. If any were to fail again, taxpayers could be on the hook for another bailout, perhaps a larger one this time.
To rein in Wall Street, we should begin by reforming the Federal Reserve, which oversees financial institutions and which uses monetary policy to maintain price stability and full employment. Unfortunately, an institution that was created to serve all Americans has been hijacked by the very bankers it regulates.
Katrina vanden Heuvel: A vigorous foreign-policy debate between Clinton and Sanders
Saturday’s Democratic debate in New Hampshire provided stark contrast to the Republican “fear and loathing in Las Vegas” imbroglio last Tuesday. Republicans dished out bombast and bluster, while the three Democratic candidates offered policy and purpose, reminding Americans that we are strengthened when we abide by our values rather than trample them in panic.
Sadly, far fewer voters watched the Democratic debate than the Republican invective. This failure was the perverse design of Democratic National Committee head Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Fla.). As she must have known, scheduling a debate on the Saturday night before Christmas across from an NFL game would discourage viewers, not attract them. Democrats drew a little over 8 million viewers; Republicans an estimated 18 million. Wasserman Schultz has scheduled a limited number of debates at obscure times — a disservice to the country and to Democratic voters — in what appears to be an effort to protect the front-runner, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton.
Dana Milbank: Oy vey! Enough of Trump.
Zei Gezunt, Lindsey Graham.
The Republican senator from South Carolina had good reasons to quit the Republican presidential race, as he did this week. He had succeeded in his goal of making the rest of the field more hawkish. He avoided an embarrassing defeat in his home-state primary. And, in leaving, he is being a mensch.
Specifically, he is helping his Republican Party avoid getting shtupped by Donald Trump.
Or make that “schlonged.” Trump, in his latest bit of narishkeit, proclaimed Monday night that Hillary Clinton got “schlonged” by Barack Obama in their 2008 contest. Thus did Trump bastardize a Yiddish noun for penis (literally, serpent) by turning it into a verb in front of 7,500 people and millions more who would see it on TV.
Oy vey iz mir! What a putz!
Sean McElwee: Inequality is destroying American democracy
Last year two political scientists, Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, released a bombshell paper suggesting that “America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened” because policymakers overwhelmingly respond to the wishes of the wealthy rather than the majority of voters. The paper expanded on Gilens’ earlier work and was widely lauded in the press, with the two authors appearing on “The Daily Show.”
But as shocking as their findings were, new evidence suggests that the superrich may have even more divergent opinions from average Americans’ and that these gaps may help explain the rise of reactionary politicians such as Donald Trump. [..]
The rise of Trump and the tea party movement owes a lot to these divides. On the other side of the aisle, supporters of avowed socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign may be justifiably upset about the many centrist Democrats who have supported GOP-backed austerity policies, likely bowing to pressure from the increasingly powerful economic elite. As Gilens wrote, “coincidental representation is a pale, counterfeit, simulacrum of democracy.” This fraudulent democracy goes a long way to accounting for the appeal of populism across the ideological spectrum.
Jared Bernstein: Did a Minimum Wage Increases Really Kill 200K Jobs? Nope.
A number of folks have asked me about this article claiming that recent minimum wage increases may have “killed as many as 200,000 jobs.” In fact, based on a balanced look at the underlying data, the article could also just as easily have argued that these increases did not kill 200,000 jobs. Let me explain.
The article is based on a review of minimum wage research by economist David Neumark, posted by the San Fransisco Fed. Neumark does not estimate whether jobs were lost due to recent increases in the minimum wage. Instead, he estimates how much minimum wages have gone up in places where increases have occurred, pulls his preferred “negative elasticity” from his lit review, and does this:
Using a −0.1 elasticity and applying it only to teenagers implies that higher minimum wages have reduced employment opportunities by about 18,600 jobs. An elasticity of −0.2 doubles this number to around 37,300 [JB, why not 37,200, as that’s 18,600*2?]. If we instead use the larger 16-24 age group and apply the smaller elasticity to reflect that a smaller share of this group is affected, the crude estimate of missing jobs rises to about 75,600. Moreover, if some very low-skilled older adults also are affected (as suggested by Clemens and Wither 2014), the number could easily be twice as high, although there is much less evidence on older workers.
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