Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news media 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: Will the Jobs Report Destroy Jobs?
An uptick, but the economy is still on life support.
On Friday the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its report on the employment situation in May. The report was much better than most economists expected, showing a large gain in jobs and a fall in the unemployment rate.
The thing is, a good jobs report may be bad for future policy. Why? Because the U.S. economy is still very much on life support. And a bit of good news is all too likely to encourage the usual suspects to end that life support too soon, with dire effects just a few months from now.
Before I get there, let me address one widespread concern. Were the employment numbers rigged?
No, they weren’t. No doubt the Trump administration, which lies about everything, would fake the numbers if it could. And the Trump-appointed head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics is a Heritage Foundation hack, with a long history of making ludicrous claims about the effects of tax cuts, the burden of the estate tax, and more.
But the jobs report is prepared by a large, professional staff that takes its responsibilities seriously. And it contains much more than the headline numbers. It’s not the kind of thing that could be altered with a Sharpie, and any effort to fake it would have set off multiple alarm bells. [..]
So the good news, despite statistical problems created by the unique economic situation — problems the bureau acknowledges — is real. But it’s also very limited.
Michelle Goldberg: Can Jamaal Bowman Be the Next A.O.C.?
The uprising over police violence fuels a progressive primary challenge.
On March 1, which feels about 20 years ago, NBC News published an essay by a congressional candidate, Jamaal Bowman, about the scars he bore from life in New York under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who was then still running for president. [..]
At the time, I was only half-aware of Bowman’s primary campaign against the high-ranking Democrat Eliot Engel, and didn’t think he had much of a chance. In 2018, the Democratic insurgents Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley won surprising victories over longtime Democratic incumbents. But since then, the only progressive primary challenger who’s ousted a sitting member of Congress has been Marie Newman in Illinois.
Engel’s district, New York’s 16th, encompasses parts of Westchester, some quite wealthy, and of the Bronx. As Bowman told me, if it were a country it would be one of the most unequal in the world. Though it’s majority-minority, affluent white people tend to vote in primaries at higher rates than poorer people of color, and the suburbanites in the New York 16th are probably not as left-leaning as the young gentrifiers who helped elect Ocasio-Cortez. Engel seemed safe.
But the political world of three months ago no longer exists. “The coronavirus and where we are now, it’s like the Great Depression and the civil rights movement at the same time,” Bowman told me. The campaign he’s running, centered on racial and economic justice, seems to match the moment. Engel’s, to put it mildly, does not. At a news conference in the Bronx, he was caught on a hot mic asking for a speaking slot, saying, “If I didn’t have a primary, I wouldn’t care.”
Eugene Robinson: Democrats, stop worrying about losing. Focus on how you’re likely to win.
If you’re a president running for reelection, and 8 out of 10 voters believe “things in the country are out of control,” you are losing. Bigly.
The question now is how much uglier and more divisive President Trump’s campaign will become as his desperation mounts — and how many of Trump’s Republican enablers choose to go down with what is beginning to look like the Titanic. The band that gets hired for the GOP convention, wherever it eventually takes place, might want to start practicing “Nearer My God to Thee.”
Here I must insert the standard warning against taking anything for granted — not that anyone possibly could, after 2016. There will be constant worrying, fretting, handwringing and second-guessing until Election Day, because that’s what Democrats do. But the objective reality, near as anyone can tell, is that Trump looks very likely to lose to Joe Biden and that Republicans may well lose the Senate as well. [..]
Some of the protests against police violence have been turned into voter-registration drives; all of them should be. If young people can be motivated to turn out to vote the way they have come out to march, Trump and the Republicans — who can’t bring themselves to utter the phrase “social justice,” much less act on it — will be toast.
Even more important, perhaps, is ensuring the right to vote. This is a battle that Democrats must fight at every level — defending the right to cast mail-in ballots, ensuring there are enough safe polling places for same-day voting, using the federal courts to ensure that state-level and local efforts to suppress voters fail.
Stop worrying about potential ways you could lose, Democrats. Start registering new voters, building a massive get-out-the-vote machine and hiring top-shelf lawyers. Focus on the ways you are very likely to win.
Catherine Rampell: Trump is running on the economy without a plan to rebuild it
As police brutality rages in the streets, President Trump can’t run on ending “American carnage.” He can’t run on criminal justice reform. He can’t run on winning back America’s respect in the world, or having completed his promised wall.
So he’s running on the economy. Even though the United States recently notched the worst economic numbers since the Great Depression.
“I built the greatest economy in the World, the best the U.S. has ever had,” he tweeted Sunday, echoing similar superlative claims he and his aides have been making for several months. “I am doing it again!”
This statement is so wrong on so many levels that it’s hard to know where to start. [..]
Meanwhile, Trump and his fellow Republicans are in no rush to provide the kind of aid that would help the economy: such as giving states and cities the emergency fiscal help they need to prevent more layoffs, or extending the enhanced unemployment benefits scheduled to expire next month. Despite the media narrative that Republicans are rooting for a boom and Democrats for a continued bust — allegedly to improve their respective electoral odds in November — the parties’ differing policy agendas suggest otherwise.
The Trump plan, to the extent one exists, appears to be simply declaring the economy great, regardless of reality. Come November, who are Americans more likely to believe: Trump, or their own bank accounts?
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