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: 2020 Was the Year Reaganism Died
The government promised to help — and it did
Maybe it was the visuals that did it. It’s hard to know what aspects of reality make it into Donald Trump’s ever-shrinking bubble — and I’m happy to say that after Jan. 20 we won’t have to care about what goes on in his not-at-all beautiful mind — but it’s possible that he became aware of how he looked, playing golf as millions of desperate families lost their unemployment benefits.
Whatever the reason, on Sunday he finally signed an economic relief bill that will, among other things, extend those benefits for a few months. And it wasn’t just the unemployed who breathed a sigh of relief. Stock market futures — which are not a measure of economic success, but still — rose. Goldman Sachs marked up its forecast of economic growth in 2021.
So this year is closing out with a second demonstration of the lesson we should have learned in the spring: In times of crisis, government aid to people in distress is a good thing, not just for those getting help, but for the nation as a whole. Or to put it a bit differently, 2020 was the year Reaganism died.
Neal K. Katyal and John Monsky: Will Pence Do the Right Thing?
On Jan. 6, the vice president will preside as Congress counts the Electoral College’s votes. Let’s hope that he doesn’t do the unthinkable — and unconstitutional.
President Trump recently tweeted that “the ‘Justice’ Department and FBI have done nothing about the 2020 Presidential Election Voter Fraud,” followed by these more ominous lines: “Never give up. See everyone in D.C. on January 6th.”
The unmistakable reference is to the day Congress will count the Electoral College’s votes, with Vice President Mike Pence presiding. Mr. Trump is leaning on the vice president and congressional allies to invalidate the November election by throwing out duly certified votes for Joe Biden.
Mr. Pence thus far has not said he would do anything like that, but his language is worrisome. Last week, he said: “We’re going to keep fighting until every legal vote is counted. We’re going to win Georgia, we’re going to save America,” as a crowd screamed, “Stop the steal.” [..]
But as a matter of constitutional text and history, any effort on Jan. 6 is doomed to fail. It would also be profoundly anti-democratic and unconstitutional.
Bryce Covert: When ‘The American Way’ Met the Coronavirus
“If you want people to do the right thing you have to make it easy, and we’ve made it hard.”
The end of the year has been awkward for Gov. Andrew Cuomo. As he promotes his new, self-congratulatory book about navigating New York through its first coronavirus wave of in the spring, he is also battling a new surge of cases.
He’s not been too happy. At a news conference in late November, he lashed out at his constituents.
“I just want to make it very simple,” he said. “If you socially distanced and you wore a mask, and you were smart, none of this would be a problem. It’s all self-imposed. It’s all self-imposed. If you didn’t eat the cheesecake, you wouldn’t have a weight problem.”
His blunt rhetoric exemplifies how political leaders — in Washington and in red and blue states — are responding to the Covid-19 crisis. They’ve increasingly decided to treat the pandemic as an issue of personal responsibility — much as our country confronts other social ills, like poverty or joblessness.
Yes, it’s absolutely critical that we wear masks and continue to keep our distance. But these individual actions were never meant to be our primary or only response to the pandemic.
Instead, more than 10 months into this crisis, our government has largely failed to act. There is no national infrastructure for testing or tracing. States have been put in a bind by federal failure, but even so, many governors have dithered on taking large-scale actions to suppress the current surge.
Richard D. Wolff: The D.C. political monopoly just does not get it
The Biden Democrats already show they learned little from Trump’s loss
The spectacle of political “leaders” disconnected from basic social realities survived Trump’s defeat. He and his GOP had shown little grasp of the two great crises of 2020: the crash of capitalism and the COVID-19 pandemic. Trump’s resulting political defeat did not reconnect them. The Biden Democrats already show they learned little from Trump’s loss; disconnection governs them too.
A basic social reality of the United States is its capitalist economic system that organizes enterprises internally into a small minority (employers) dominating the majority (employees), with markets to distribute resources and products. Like capitalisms everywhere, the U.S. version crashes recurringly. Variously called crises, recessions, or depressions, they have happened, on average, every four to seven years throughout capitalism’s history. With three in this century’s first 20 years (“dot-com” in 2000, “subprime mortgage” in 2008, and “COVID-19” in 2020), the United States illustrates that four-to-seven-year schedule. The 2020 crash is second only to the Great Depression of the 1930s in its social impact. That fact alone demands major policy interventions on the scale, at least, of what was done then (including the creation of Social Security, federal unemployment insurance, the first minimum wage, and the creation of millions of federal jobs). Moreover, the 1930s were not simultaneously a time of deadly viral pandemic. Given the uniquely immense challenge of 2020’s two crises, no remotely adequate policies were undertaken nor even contemplated by Trump, Biden, Republican or Democratic establishments. They just don’t get it.
Paul Waldman: To save their political skins, Republicans pretend to love big government
In the middle of a pandemic, arguing for conservative governance is a political loser./em>
When President Trump finally wised up and signed the latest pandemic relief bill, few politicians felt the relief more than David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, the two Georgia senators fighting for their political lives in a runoff election now just a week away. But as the fate of the bill came to dominate the race, something remarkable happened: In order to save Perdue and Loeffler, Senate Republicans had to betray some of the most important principles they claim to hold.
There may be plenty of atheists in foxholes, but apparently there are no small-government conservatives in a pandemic.
The bill, with its extended unemployment benefits and $600 checks for most Americans, is a fraction of the size of what Democrats passed through the House months ago, and far smaller than it should have been; it was the recalcitrance of Senate Republicans and Trump’s infantile whims that kept it hostage for so long. [..]
The idea that the bill happened because Loeffler and Perdue worked so tirelessly for it is laughable, but there’s a truth there: The only reason Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell allowed any relief bill at all is the runoff election. Were it not for the fact that, as McConnell recently told Republicans, “Kelly and David are getting hammered” on the lack of a stimulus, he would have been happy to leave Americans to suffer in the hope that in their misery they would blame Joe Biden.
But Senate Republicans didn’t find the solution to their political problem in the form of conservative governing principles. The public isn’t crying out for a cut in the capital gains tax or the slashing of environmental regulations.