“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 $700 Billion Gift to Wealthy Foreigners
Why is Donald Trump planning to give away $700 billion — that’s billion, with a “b” — to foreigners, no strings attached? You probably didn’t know that he’s planning to do this. In fact, he himself almost surely has no idea that he’s planning to do this. But it would be one clearly predictable consequence of the tax “reform” he and his congressional allies are trying to pass.
Some features of the Trump tax plan are still up in the air. For example, we don’t know exactly how upper-middle-class taxpayers will be punished — will they lose their deduction on state and local taxes, some of their tax breaks on retirement accounts, or something else? But the core of the plan is clearly an enormous cut in taxes on corporate profits, which the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center estimates at $2 trillion over the next decade.
Now, the administration claims that all of this tax cut will be passed on to workers in the form of higher wages. In fact, it claims that the wage gains from the tax cut will be several times as large as the revenue loss.
Jon Batiste: Fats Domino and the Rock ’n’ Roll I Didn’t Know
My first exposure to rock ’n’ roll came from watching mostly white bands like Nirvana, Korn and Limp Bizkit perform angsty songs on MTV. I bought some of their albums, but the genre didn’t really resonate with me until I learned that black people could be rock ’n’ roll artists too. None had as great an influence on me as Fats Domino, one of the biggest stars of the early rock ’n’ roll era, who died on Tuesday in Harvey, La.
I was raised in a musical household in New Orleans. I played the drums and piano as a child, and my dad played bass. He and his bandmates encouraged me to study the history of rock ’n’ roll, not dismiss it. In one of my weekly runs to Blockbuster’s used CDs section, I found a Led Zeppelin CD, which eventually led me to Jimi Hendrix. He was the first black person I learned about who played rock ’n’ roll — a term I thought was fixed but whose meaning kept expanding.
Around then, I began to play gigs with bands that would occasionally cover Mr. Hendrix’s songs, and it was powerful to watch the audience react. I wanted to be able to tap into that kind of energy too, but also to balance it with something else I couldn’t quite identify yet.
Around 1998, when I was 12 years old, I sat in on one of my father’s gigs and first heard “Blueberry Hill” by Fats Domino. The song seemed deeply familiar; it was almost as if it was otherworldly, floating somewhere in the ether. I had never heard such a percussive piano section. Folks of various ages and races got up to dance and sing along in a joyous communal outburst.
In this yearslong study of rock ’n’ roll, I had finally arrived at the beginning: Fats Domino.
Eugene Robnison: The Democrats are in crisis, too
President Trump is not the disease that afflicts our politics. He’s a symptom, like nausea or an embarrassing rash.
Both major parties are in crisis, and I believe the reason is that the ground has shifted beneath them in ways they do not understand. Until the contours of the new political landscape become clear and the parties reshape themselves accordingly, I fear that chaos and turmoil will reign as the new normal.
Let me be clear: I am not postulating any sort of false equivalency. It was the Republican Party that nominated Trump for president, and it consequently must be blamed for this horror show of an administration. The party that loves to grandly invoke the name of Abraham Lincoln sent to the White House a crass egomaniac who cynically heightens racial animosities — a man who, by temperament and ability, is patently unfit for high office. You did that, Republicans.
Catherine Rampell: Republicans are propping up scammers and cheaters
Republicans claim to believe no company is too big to fail. The almighty market must be allowed to work its magic, and firms with defective business models should face the consequences.
Yet over the course of this year, President Trump and Congress have worked to prop up lots of defective firms. By which I mean: Companies whose business models are contingent on scamming customers, shortchanging workers and suckling the government teat.
Just this week, the Senate limited consumers’ ability to fight back against financial firms that have cheated them. Which is of course an implicit subsidy to firms whose profits depend on cheating.
Right now, if a bank wrongs you — opens a fake account in your name, say — you might be able to move your business elsewhere. But even if you do, it’s exceedingly difficult to get restitution.
That’s because a common condition of doing business with a bank, credit-card company, payday lender or other financial institution is that you sign away your legal rights.
Ana Marie Cox: President Trump thinks he understands addiction. He’s wrong.
As a recovering addict and alcoholic, I find nothing quite so galling as a lecture about sobriety from a lifelong teetotaler. “Drugs are terrible! Take it from me, a person who has never tried a single one.”
You don’t even have to have struggled with the harrowing push-pull of chemical dependency to instinctively distrust such smug scolding; ask literally any human person. Ignoring overly sanctimonious counsel is, arguably, what makes us human. Pious warnings against pleasurable but illicit behavior are demonstrably, singularly, historically useless. I am pretty sure, for instance, that someone, somewhere once warned Donald Trump not to cheat on his wife.
Yet it was Trump, famously abstinent if not always sober-minded, who on Thursday made self-enforced abstinence from illegal narcotics the central plank of the administration’s belated new anti-opioid epidemic policy. He touted a “massive advertising campaign to get people, especially children, not to want to take drugs in the first place.” [..]
In any case, Trump’s teetotaler tsking on the solution to the opioid crisis encapsulates what may be his most consistent approach to policy: boastful, brazen ignorance. Ignorance so profound it mistakes itself for genius, incuriosity so complete it cannot be roused into even partial shame.
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