“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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Catherine Rampell: This tax reform thing won’t be as easy as Republicans think
Paul Ryan’s white whale is almost in sight.
On Wednesday, after years of wishin’ and hopin’ and thinkin’ and prayin’ (and lately, nose-holdin’), the Republican House speaker and his party will finally drop the text of their long-sought tax bill.
Then, thanks to clever manipulation of Senate rules, the bill will secure swift passage, requiring only a simple majority of senators (meaning Democrats cannot obstruct) and a gold-Sharpied presidential signature for delivery, at long last, to a cheering Republican base. Right?
Wrong.
Even with President Trump in Asia (and if Ryan is lucky, too busy to trash his own tax plan), the GOP bill faces enormous challenges.
Dean Baker: The Tax Scam We Know And The Tax Scam We Don’t Know
There has been much attention to the plan put forward by Republicans in Congress to cut individual and corporate income taxes. According to analysis done by independent sources, close to 80 percent of these cuts will go to the richest one percent of the population.
While this may seem unfair and unwarranted in an economy where the rich have seen the overwhelming majority of the gains from growth in the last four decades, we have been told not to worry because the boost to growth will make everyone winners. The average family has been promised an income gain of $4,000 a year and possibly as much as $9,000.
It is possible to construct economic theories where corporate tax cuts do produce large gains, but these theories clearly do not describe the world we live in. For example back in the mid-1980s, the U.S. lowered the corporate tax rate from 46 percent to 35 percent. Rather than producing an investment boom, the late 1980s were the weakest non-recession period for investment in the post-World War II era.
Richard North Patterson: Breeding Antifa
Earlier this month, students at the University of Oregon blocked its president from speaking. The reason? He supported free speech on campus — a position which, they asserted, engendered “fascism and white supremacy.” Thus do these historical illiterates combine ignorance with unintended irony — in some of history’s darkest chapters, fascists jailed, imprisoned, and killed others for protesting fascism.
Sadly, colleges themselves have planted the seeds of such intolerance. In recent years, campuses have sheltered students from subjectively offensive speech or reading materials. Some create “safe spaces” for homogenous beliefs; others issue “trigger warnings” about books purported to evoke sexism or bigotry. Instead of teaching students to debate differences and confront the objectionable, they offer cocoons sheltering them from discomfort or even thought.
To our detriment, they create Americans at once timorous and authoritarian. Martin Luther King did not seek out safe spaces; the trigger warnings he braved, so tragically, did not involve speech. Much of his greatness lay in confronting danger, transcending hurt — and offending the sensibilities of racist whites.
Robert Kuttner: Manufacturing Lies
Donald Trump promises to make American manufacturing great again. Yet all of his policies would do just the opposite.
America was going to get tough on NAFTA, right? The goal was to “rebalance” trade among the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. Well, a parade of corporate lobbyists demanding that we keep NAFTA has caused the administration to put off negotiations.
If NAFTA is renegotiated, the changes will be mostly cosmetic. And anyway, NAFTA is only a small part of American manufacturing woes.
If we were serious about restoring good blue-collar manufacturing jobs, what would it take? For starters, we’d need an industrial policy, something that both political parties have rejected as meddling with the market.
One place where we actually have a modest industrial policy is at the Energy Department, where government spends $300 million a year supporting new technologies to help American companies compete in emerging industries such as solar energy and wind turbines. Oops, the Trump administration proposes to shut all of that down — too associated with Obama and who needs green industries when we have coal?
William Rivers Pitt: Stop Trying to Convince Trump Voters. Start Trying to Win
You have to wonder what Jeff Flake and Bob Corker are thinking today. I’m sure neither were expecting their Sunday to be this quiet. These two stalwart bedrock pillar Senate Republicans dropped a couple of building-sized bricks on the White House last week, and all that came of the resulting DONK was yet another hashtagged rhetorical victory lap by Donald Trump. [..]
It is the fact of their right-wing street cred that makes this situation all the more remarkable. If normal political gravity still existed, these senators’ statements would rank right up there with the “Have you left no sense of decency?” line attorney Joseph Welch deployed to obliterate Joseph McCarthy in 1954. The dam holding back an ocean of congressional resentment should have broken, and the resulting political flood tide should have gone through 1600 Pennsylvania like the rivers that flushed out the Augean stables … and yet, here we sit on this quiet Sunday, with Flake and Corker left to plumb the mysteries of Mallard Fillmore in the funny pages while wrestling with perhaps the greatest imponderable of the age.
What do you have to do to make a damn dent?
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