Wednesday punditry.
David Leonhardt:
The world’s rich countries are now conducting a dangerous experiment. They are repeating an economic policy out of the 1930s — starting to cut spending and raise taxes before a recovery is assured — and hoping today’s situation is different enough to assure a different outcome.
How scary is that?
Thomas Frank:
Recent increases in the federal deficit have made the pundit class tremble, but they aren't really mysterious. They are, for the most part, a product of the recession, which has reduced tax revenue, justified the bailouts and last year's stimulus package, and brought unemployment insurance and other "automatic stabilizers" into effect.
Solve the recession and we'll eventually bring the deficit back down, too. The real danger is that instead we will decide to regard the deficit as a problem entirely unto itself—a quasi-moral issue that needs to be addressed independently of the larger economy—and that we will proceed to budget-balance ourselves right back into the economic ditch. For a glimpse of how this works, take a look at once-booming Ireland, where a starvation diet designed to control the deficit has made the recession more or less permanent.
WaPo:
Elena Kagan told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday that her political outlook is "generally progressive," but the glimpses she offered into her legal views defied Republican efforts to pigeonhole the type of Supreme Court justice she would be.
Added from Politico:
When Graham questioned her about the Christmas Day bomber, Kagan started to answer seriously until he cut her off, asking her instead what she was doing on Christmas Day.
"Like all Jews, I was probably at a Chinese restaurant," Kagan said, prompting the hearing room to erupt in laughter.
Of course she was. What else was open? So what movie did she see?
Ruth Marcus:
The campaign video is such a transparent ploy, the temptation is to ignore it. After all, Tea Party candidate Rick Barber is a long shot in his July runoff race for the Republican nomination for an Alabama congressional seat.
But then you hit replay, and see again the iconic images, you think you must have imagined. They last a fraction of a second, but they are so imprinted on the modern brain that is all it takes to recognize the photographs. Arbeit Macht Frei, spelled out in cold metal on the concentration camp gates. And the skeletal survivors, packed naked in bunks four tiers high.
And now these images appear in a campaign video in which Barber inveighs against the evils of taxation and has an imaginary conversation with Abe Lincoln.
NY Times editorial:
Without doubt, the two biggest threats to the economy are unemployment and the dire financial condition of the states, yet lawmakers have failed to deal intelligently with either one.