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: McConnell to Every State: Drop Dead
Blocking federal aid is vile, but it’s also hypocritical.
Covid-19 has killed tens of thousands of Americans, and will clearly kill many more. The lockdown needed to contain the coronavirus is causing an economic slump several times as deep as the Great Recession.
Yet this necessary slump doesn’t have to be accompanied by severe financial hardship. We have the resources to ensure that every American has enough to eat, that people don’t lose health insurance, that they don’t lose their homes because they can’t pay rent or mortgage fees. There’s also no reason we should see punishing cuts in essential public services.
Unfortunately, it’s looking increasingly likely that tens of millions of Americans will in fact suffer extreme hardship and that there will be devastating cuts in services. Why? The answer mainly boils down to two words: Mitch McConnell.
Jamele Bouie: Mitch McConnell Is Not as Clever as He Thinks He Is
Leaving states to fend for themselves is a shocking abdication of responsibility that may haunt his party in November.
When banks, corporations and wealthy individuals need bailouts, the Republican Party is there, pen in hand. The $2 trillion CARES Act reserved $500 billion for aid to large industries as well as $90 billion in tax breaks for owners of “pass-through” businesses — a benefit that overwhelmingly aids rich hedge fund investors and owners of real estate businesses. Even the small business fund ($350 billion for firms with fewer than 500 employees) has mostly benefited larger companies.
But when ordinary Americans need help to pay their bills, and when states — which can’t run deficits — need help to avoid fiscal collapse, the Republican Party is much less interested. [..]
Democrats want this direct aid to states to happen, but Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, has balked. “I think this whole business of additional assistance for state and local governments needs to be thoroughly evaluated,” McConnell said in an interview on Wednesday with the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt. “There’s not going to be any desire on the Republican side to bail out state pensions by borrowing money from future generations.” His office then made his partisan target even clearer, highlighting his interview with the heading “Stopping Blue State Bailouts,” as if Congress were responsible not for the entire country but only those states that support the Republican Party.
Eugene Robinson: There are no shortcuts to defeating the coronavirus
In 1934, Cole Porter wrote an iconic cowboy song titled “Don’t Fence Me In.” A partial list of the artists who have recorded it over the years suggests that the lyrics — “Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above, / Don’t fence me in. / Let me ride through the wide open country that I love, / Don’t fence me in.” — capture something fundamental about the national self-image. Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Ella Fitzgerald, Willie Nelson, the Killers and David Byrne have all put their stamp on the song.
Yet because of covid-19, we’re fenced in, and must remain fenced in a while longer. But it is only natural that we don’t like our confinement one bit — and understandable that some of us grasp at straws to try to rationalize our way out of it.
Freedom of movement is fundamental to our national mythology, our collective origin story. We inhabit a continental expanse of spacious skies, amber waves of grain and purple mountain majesties. The vast majority of our ancestors came or were brought here from elsewhere, and family lore often consists largely of the stories of how they moved from one part of the country to another in search of opportunity and happiness. Our own lives, for many of us, have been peripatetic: I was born in the South, went to college in the Midwest and worked my first job on the West Coast. Right now, and probably for weeks to come, I can’t even venture across town.
Catherine Rampell: It appears the Trump administration is doing all it can to drive away health professionals
President Trump oh-so-graciously excluded medical workers from his latest executive order suspending immigration. So you might assume that whatever his usual anti-immigrant animus, Trump recognizes the need to make foreign-born health professionals feel welcome in this country. At least during a pandemic.
You’d be wrong.
Immigrants are a critical part of the U.S. health-care system, representing some 18 percent of its workers. In some occupations, the share is even higher: 22 percent of nursing assistants, for instance, and 29 percent of physicians, according to the Migration Policy Institute. Rural areas are especially reliant on immigrant doctors.
But long before this executive order was conceived via late-night tweet, the administration began cracking down on virtually every kind of immigration — including the immigration required to staff a health-care system facing chronic worker shortages.
Karen Tumulty: Young people really don’t like Trump. And more of them plan to vote.
There has been an assumption that former vice president Joe Biden could have a problem inspiring young people to vote this year. Not only is he of a generation far removed from theirs, but he also acts that way. In the Democratic primaries, Biden got trounced by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) among people under 30 — or at least among that disappointingly low proportion who bothered to vote.
But a survey released Thursday by Harvard University’s Institute of Politics suggests that Biden has something going for him that could matter more than anything else to young adults: He’s not Donald Trump.
The latest installment of the Harvard Youth Poll, a survey that the Harvard institute has been doing biannually for two decades, shows that 18-to-29-year-olds favor Biden over the president by 23 percentage points. Among those who are most likely to vote, Biden has a 30-point edge. More surprising: That is almost identical to the margin that Sanders would be enjoying if he were at the top of the Democratic ticket, the survey says.