“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: Trump’s Deadly Narcissism
According to a new Quinnipiac poll, a majority of Americans believe that Donald Trump is unfit to be president. That’s pretty remarkable. But you have to wonder how much higher the number would be if people really knew what’s going on.
For the trouble with Trump isn’t just what he’s doing, but what he isn’t. In his mind, it’s all about him — and while he’s stroking his fragile ego, basic functions of government are being neglected or worse.
Let’s talk about two stories that might seem separate: the deadly neglect of Puerto Rico, and the ongoing sabotage of American health care. What these stories have in common is that millions of Americans are going to suffer, and hundreds if not thousands die, because Trump and his officials are too self-centered to do their jobs.
Start with the disaster in Puerto Rico and the neighboring U.S. Virgin Islands.
Michelle Goldberrg: How Donald Trump Opened the Door to Roy Moore
In 2002, the Alabama Supreme Court issued a ruling in a child custody battle between a lesbian mother and an allegedly abusive father. The parents had originally lived in Los Angeles, and when they divorced in 1992, the mother received primary physical custody. But she was an alcoholic, and in 1996, she sent her three children to live with her ex-husband, who’d since moved to Alabama, while she went to rehab. Her lawyer, Wendy Brooks Crew, told me they had an understanding that the kids would stay with their dad for a year, but he refused to return them to their mother because she was living with a woman.
There was evidence that the father was abusing the kids, who by 2002 were teenagers. He acknowledged whipping them with a belt and forcing them to sit with paper bags over their heads. He refused to send the younger children to summer school, even though their grades were bad. When the kids called their mother, their father taped the conversations. By the time the case got to the Alabama Supreme Court, a lower court had ruled in the mother’s favor. The Alabama Supreme Court reversed the ruling, with then Chief Justice Roy Moore writing in a concurring opinion that a gay person couldn’t be a fit parent. [..]
The man who wrote those words is now the Republican candidate for the United States Senate from Alabama. In some ways, this is an embarrassment for Donald Trump, who heeded establishment advice to support Moore’s opponent, sitting Senator Luther Strange, in the primary. But Moore’s victory is also a victory for Trumpism, a populist movement that has eroded normal limits on political behavior.
Richard Eskow: Can Centrism Be a Movement? The Answer May Surprise You
Astronomers tell us the stars we see in the night sky died many millennia ago. Their light has spent eons crossing the emptiness of space. To us, they still seem to glitter and shine, but were extinguished long ago.
Last week, the Washington Post ran an op-ed about the political framework known as “centrism.” The name is derived from the from the fact that its ideology draws equally from leaders of both the Republican and Democratic parties. The Post’s headline in the Washington Post last week asked the question, “Can centrism be a movement?” [..]
About that question: Can centrism be a movement? The answer is yes. Only not this form of centrism. Voters have rejected it over and over. But real centrism, based on the needs and ideals of most voters, could very well become a movement.
60 percent of U.S. voters believe that the government should guarantee healthcare as a right for all people, and a growing number want a single-payer system. Polls have shown that voters want Social Security expanded, not cut. Most voters want to see taxes raised on the wealthy and corporations, and there is bipartisan support for breaking up the big banks.
Pundits have tended to label those kinds of proposals “left,” “extreme, and even “marginal.” A better word would be “centrist” – based on the center of public opinion, not that of people in Washington.
Voter-based centrism could become the movement of the future. But insider centrism, the kind that brings leaders of both parties together with their corporate funders, will always be the plaything of the elite. If the Democrats don’t turn their backs on it, their party will be as dead as the stars that shine in the autumn sky over Washington.
Eugene Robinson: Trump’s Cabinet loves living large
So are there members of President Trump’s Cabinet who don’t travel by private jet? Put another way, do any of our top officials understand the difference between public service and personal luxury?
Trump may not have Made America Great Again for you or me, but he has made it pretty sweet for political appointees who want to jet around like billionaires at other people’s expense. Nice work if you can get it.
Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price seems to have been the most egregious abuser. According to Politico, Price took at least 24 flights on private chartered aircraft since early May, at a total cost of more than $400,000. He also took military jets to Africa, Asia and Europe at an additional cost of more than $500,000, Politico reported. Until all the scrutiny, Price wasn’t picking up the tab. We the taxpayers were. On Thursday, Price said he would write a check to the Treasury Department for about $52,000 to cover the cost of his seat on those chartered domestic flights .
Now, everyone understands that the secretary of defense would take an expensive military flight to visit the troops in a war zone, or that the secretary of state would be flown in his own government plane to an international conference, or that the secretary of homeland security might charter a jet to reach the scene of some domestic crisis. But the secretary of HHS? Did some regional office need him to make an emergency delivery of printer ink?
Catherine Rampell: The GOP tax plan is ridiculous. Here’s why.
Last year, I proposed a handy rule of thumb for evaluating the economic proposals of politicians: The more growth they promise, the worse their plan probably is.
Why? Because the promise of bonkers growth usually means the politicians need that bonkers growth to paper over the ginormous deficits sure to follow — in the real world, under more realistic assumptions.
If you assume that the economy goes gangbusters and everyone gets a lot richer, then the tax base swells, spending on social-safety-net services falls, and hallelujah! That expensive thing you want no longer looks so expensive. Maybe it’s even free!
This rule of thumb was useful during the presidential campaign, when candidates promised that their infrastructure, health and tax proposals would “pay for themselves” through faster growth. It’s relevant again with the “Big Six’s” new tax “plan.”
I put “plan” in scare-quotes here because it’s not really a plan. At best it’s an outline, offering barely more detail than the bullet points the Trump administration released in April. It doesn’t even specify the thresholds for the individual income-tax rates it proposes. It also doesn’t identify a single individual tax preference it would kill, despite claiming to simplify the code and close lots of “loopholes.” Even the state and local tax deduction, which administration officials have talked about eliminating, isn’t explicitly mentioned.
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