“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; Elections Have Consequences
You have to be seriously geeky to get excited when the Internal Revenue Service releases a new batch of statistics. Well, I’m a big geek; like quite a few other people who work on policy issues, I was eagerly awaiting the I.R.S.’s tax tables for 2013, which were released last week.
And what these tables show is that elections really do have consequences.
You might think that this is obvious. But on the left, in particular, there are some people who, disappointed by the limits of what President Obama has accomplished, minimize the differences between the parties. Whoever the next president is, they assert — or at least, whoever it is if it’s not Bernie Sanders — things will remain pretty much the same, with the wealthy continuing to dominate the scene. And it’s true that if you were expecting Mr. Obama to preside over a complete transformation of America’s political and economic scene, what he’s actually achieved can seem like a big letdown.
But the truth is that Mr. Obama’s election in 2008 and re-election in 2012 had some real, quantifiable consequences. Which brings me to those I.R.S. tables.
Dean Baker: Making America safer for predatory capitalism
You can’t live in the United States without hearing celebrations of capitalism and the wonders of entrepreneurship. People such as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are lauded for making it possible to buy low cost computers to put on our desks or carry around. The wizards at Google made it possible to search the huge offerings on the web in a fraction of a second. And Jeff Bezos made an Amazon.com click the first and last stop on tens of millions of shopping trips.
All of these successes have dark sides. Jobs used old-fashioned anti-raiding agreements to keep competitors from enticing away his workers. Gates and Google have both engaged in anti-competitive practices that likely would have brought antitrust enforcement in prior decades. And Amazon has prospered not only because of low prices and good service, but also by being exempted from the requirement to collect the same sales tax as its brick-and-mortar competitors.
But in these cases, and many others, there clearly have been huge benefits to consumers and the economy as a whole as the result of innovative capitalists. However, in today’s economy, getting rich does not necessarily require better serving your customers. A series by the New York Times on arbitration clauses in contracts shows that one of the best ways to make money is to find ways to rip off your customers.
Richard Wolfe: From Trump to Clinton, the race for the White House is powered by delusion
We have reached the point of the long presidential primaries where some clarity has normally been reached. After several months of overproduced TV debates, over-hyped candidate interviews and over-examined polls, the first votes are just one month away. Several candidates have already dropped out of the race; several more donors and hacks have either jumped or been pushed out the window. As George W Bush liked to say, it’s voting time.
But instead of clarity, the invisible primaries of this cycle – the phoney war phase – have brought us to a state of delusion. The chief culprit is Trumpmania: a chronic ailment that has engulfed everyone from the voters lining up to attend his freewheeling rallies to the august pundits who lined up to dismiss the supposed fad last year; from the horrified Republican establishment to the transfixed news media and, of , the braggadocious candidate himself.
Robert Reich: At Stake in 2016: Ending the Vicious Cycle of Wealth and Power
What’s at stake this election year? Let me put as directly as I can.
America has succumbed to a vicious cycle in which great wealth translates into political power, which generates even more wealth, and even more power.
This spiral is most apparent in declining tax rates on corporations and on top personal incomes (much in the form of wider tax loopholes), along with a profusion of government bailouts and subsidies (to Wall Street bankers, hedge-fund partners, oil companies, casino tycoons, and giant agribusiness owners, among others).
The vicious cycle of wealth and power is less apparent, but even more significant, in economic rules that now favor the wealthy.
Jessica Valenti: Why would you trust a teen to raise a kid, but not to have an abortion?
Dealing with an unplanned and unwanted pregnancy is a difficult experience for anyone. But for teenagers, who have to juggle increasing, and increasingly complicated, financial and legal barriers to abortion access, “difficult” becomes nearly impossible. And it shouldn’t be.
For instance, 21 states require parental consent before a teenager can have an abortion; 13 mandate that at least one parent be notified; and five states mandate both consent and notification. States that require parental notification and consent for a teenager to have a child? Zero.
Surely if we believe young people are mature enough to parent or responsible enough to carry a baby to term and thoughtful enough to make the decision to put it up for adoption without parental or judicial intervention (though there are five states that require parental involvement (pdf) if a minor puts a child up for adoption), they should also have to right to decide whether or not to get a 10-minute medical procedure.
Robert Kuttner: Thinking Harder about Political Correctness
Donald Trump and the rest of the Republican presidential pack have had a field day disparaging political correctness as an affliction of liberals that is resented by regular Americans. Some liberal commentators have suggested that political correctness has become a serious albatross for Democrats.
Columnist Thomas Edsall, in a piece for the New York Times online, cited polls showing that large numbers of Americans, Democrats as well as Republicans, agreed that “political correctness” was a big problem.
But what exactly is political correctness? The term was first used by lefties to make fun of themselves. I’ve been hearing it used ironically since the 1970s. As in: “This may not be politically correct, but may I buy you a drink?”
This use of “politically correct” initially reflected the New Left and the feminist movement of that era mocking the efforts by the Communist Party to insist on rigid conventions of speech, along the lines of George Orwell’s Thought Police in his novel 1984.
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