“Pondering 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: On the Power of Being Awful
The 100-day reviews are in, and they’re terrible. The health care faceplants just keep coming; the administration’s tax “plan” offers less detail than most supermarket receipts; Trump has wimped out on his promises to get aggressive on foreign trade. The gap between big boasts and tiny achievements has never been wider.
Yet there have, by my count, been seven thousand news articles — O.K., it’s a rough estimate — about how Trump supporters are standing by their man, are angry at those meanies in the news media, and would gladly vote for him all over again. What’s going on?
The answer, I’d suggest, lies buried in the details of the latest report on gross domestic product. No, really.
For the past few months, economists who track short-term developments have been noting a peculiar divergence between “soft” and “hard” data. Soft data are things like surveys of consumer and business confidence; hard data are things like actual retail sales. Normally these data tell similar stories (which is why the soft data are useful as a sort of early warning system for the coming hard data). Since the 2016 election, however, the two kinds of data have diverged, with reported confidence surging — and, yes, a bump in stocks — but no real sign of a pickup in economic activity.
Kim Kelly: We need May Day more than ever. Unite to dream and fight for a better tomorrow
April showers bring May flowers, and this year, following a positively dreadful April, the flowers of revolution – black flags and red banners – will bloom alongside the crocuses and daffodils. May Day, the pagan feast turned workers’ holiday, has always belonged to the people, whether they were hoisting maypoles or hurling molotov cocktails, and the first of May’s revolutionary roots will be on full display this year.
This year marks the centenary of the Russian revolution, so it’s already a big year for the radical left and for revolutionary thinkers everywhere. But that’s not why May Day 2017 stands to be remembered as the most important since 1886, when American labor activists intensified their campaign for the eight-hour workday, and seven American and immigrant anarchists were executed in the Haymarket Square show trial. [..]
So this May Day, take some time to enjoy that energy, to see the excitement on the faces of your friends and comrades, and to take a few precious moments to dream of a better tomorrow. The worker must have bread – and a living wage, and the right to unionize, and the right to live her life as she sees fit – but, especially now, she must have roses too.
Charles M. Blow: Trump’s Degradation of the Language
One of the more pernicious and insidious effects of the Donald Trump regime may well be the damage he does to language itself.
Trumpian language is a thing unto itself: some manner of sophistry peppered with superlatives. It is a way of speech that defies the Reed-Kellogg sentence diagram. It is a jumble of incomplete thoughts stitched together with arrogance and ignorance.
America is suffering under the tyranny of gibberish spouted by the lord of his faithful 46 percent.
As researchers at Carnegie Mellon pointed out last spring, presidential candidates in general use “words and grammar typical of students in grades 6-8, though Donald Trump tends to lag behind the others.” Indeed, among the presidents in the university’s analysis, Trump’s vocabulary usage was the lowest and his grammatical usage was only better than one president: George W. Bush.
Trump’s employment of reduced rhetoric is not without precedent and is in fact a well-documented tool of history’s strongmen.
Steven Rattner: Trump’s Tax Cuts May Be More Damaging Than Reagan’s
As a young New York Times reporter nearly four decades ago, I helped chronicle the rollout of what proved to be among our country’s greatest economic follies — the alchemistic belief that huge tax cuts can pay for themselves by unleashing faster economic growth.
Buoyed by this idea, Congress passed the largest tax reductions in history just seven months after Ronald Reagan’s inauguration. I was deeply skeptical of the illogical notion that tax cuts could somehow pay for themselves, so much so that I was attacked by name on the Wall Street Journal op-ed page. That, in turn, caused consternation among my editors in an era when reporting was meant to be less analytical.
Nonetheless, I felt no joy as the plan immediately made a bad economy worse.
Now comes Donald Trump, essentially trying to revive that same supply-side credo (famously branded “voodoo economics” by George H. W. Bush) with his proposal for $5.5 trillion of tax giveaways, mostly for business. Even some of the outsize personalities that I encountered in 1981 are back, most notoriously the concept’s godfather, Arthur Laffer, who advised the Trump presidential campaign.
Steven W. Thrasher: Barack Obama’s $400,000 speaking fees reveal what few want to admit
The reason many of us have been critical of Barack Obama’s outrageous $400,000 speaking fee is that it robs us of a fantasy: that sooner or later, the first black president was going to use his considerable powers, in or out of office, to help the economic ravages of the poor, who are disproportionately black.
That Obama’s project was or ever would be racial and economic justice was always a dream – and the sooner we let go of this and recognize Obama for who he is and what he does, the better we’ll all be.
Some people who disagree with me believe I am racist for not lauding Obama’s right to cash in on the presidency the same way the Clinton and Bush dynasties have. I will never deny the representational and psychological value of having had Obama in the Oval Office and his beautiful black family living in the White House. I always liked the guy immensely, even as I’ve criticized the politician.
But when it comes to the economics of systemic racism, I don’t think anyone should earn $400,000 an hour, and I certainly don’t worry about criticizing black people also earning that obscene sum. I’m much more concerned with factors of economic racism such as why white people have 12 times the wealth of black people; why black families would need to work 228 years to build the wealth of white families; why the median wealth of single black women is $5 and how the economic crash of 2008 was an apocalyptic theft of wealth from black homeowners to Wall Street which was never prosecuted.
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