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: The Ghost of Sabotage Future
This winter’s economy won’t be as grim as feared, but what about after?
The not-a-stimulus deal Congress reached over the weekend — seriously, this is about disaster relief, not boosting the economy — didn’t come a moment too soon. Actually, it came much too late: Crucial aid to many unemployed Americans and businesses expired months ago. But now some of that aid is back, for a while.
True, the aid will be less generous than it was in the spring and summer: $300 a week in enhanced unemployment benefits, rather than $600. But because the workers still out of a job as a result of the pandemic tended to have low earnings even before the coronavirus struck, they will, on average, be receiving something like 85 percent of their pre-Covid-19 income.
By the way, although the one-time $600 checks to a much wider group of Americans are getting much of the media coverage, they account for only a small percentage of the overall expense and are far less crucial than the unemployment benefits to keeping families afloat.
So what’s not to like about this relief package? There’s some dumb stuff, like a tax break for corporate meal expenses — fighting a deadly pandemic with three-martini lunches. But the serious problem with this deal is that economic aid will end far too soon: Enhanced unemployment benefits will last just 11 weeks. And the process by which the deal was reached has ominous implications for the future.
Eugene Robinson: So long, 2020. We won’t miss you.
We are still cataloging, much less healing from, this terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad year.
There’s panic in Europe that’s fast spreading over an apparently super-contagious strain of the coronavirus in Britain. The outgoing president of the United States reportedly spent hours last week entertaining deranged, seditious ideas about clinging to power through the imposition of martial law. And, as a grace note, the Kilauea volcano in Hawaii began erupting Sunday night.
Because, of course, 2020.
I believe I speak for humankind, with few exceptions, when I say we will all be overjoyed to see the back of this awful year.
It’s not as if no good things at all happened in 2020. Joe Biden was elected president, stamping a Jan. 20, 2021, expiration date on Donald Trump’s putrid presidency. Scientists developed vaccines against covid-19 in record time, marking the beginning of the end of this deadly, devastating, soul-crushing pandemic. Also, um, let me think — oh yes, there was no extinction-level asteroid strike, which is definitely a plus.
For many across the country and the world there were, of course, personal milestones and triumphs. Several of my good friends were blessed with the birth of a first grandchild. To see the joy in their faces, even via Zoom, warmed my heart.
Overall, though, we have been through a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad 12 months. It will take some time just to catalogue all the damage 2020 has done, much less begin to heal from it. As a general rule, I’ve always thought the end of the calendar year was an arbitrary and irrational date for marking some sort of generalized turning of the page. This year, however, I’m desperately hoping it proves to be just that: a bright line between what has been and what will be.
Amanda Marcotte: Trump’s coup goes beyond a grift: The president is desperately seeking any path to stay in power
New reporting shows that Trump really still thinks he can steal this election
For weeks now, Donald Trump’s hopes of stealing the 2020 presidential election from the winner, Joe Biden, have been fading. Nonetheless, the dumbest and worst president in American history continued sending out fundraising appeals to his endlessly gullible supporters, giving birth to the theory — to which I, personally, subscribed — that Trump’s coup is little more than another one of his many schemes to defraud people. After all, the Trump campaign spent very little on the actual legal efforts to challenge the election and redirected most of the cash into what is likely going to be used as a slush fund for Trump and his family.
And yet, as Maggie Haberman and Zolan Kanno-Youngs reported in the New York Times on Saturday, Trump is deep in talks with an increasingly unhinged cast of characters, all of whom believe there must be a way to steal the election even though the Electoral College made Biden’s win official last week. The president invited conspiracy theorists like his former lawyer Sidney Powell and former national security advisor Gen. Michael Flynn to the White House on Friday to discuss a potential declaration of martial law as a last-ditch effort to force a second vote in some swing states. That suggestion came from the disgraced Flynn, who has been involved in violently oppressive work on behalf of Turkey’s authoritarian leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan [..]
The story isn’t just alarming because Trump is flirting with violence, either. It’s alarming because it’s proof that Trump is continuing to push these idiotic conspiracy theories because he really, truly does think there’s still a way for him to steal this election.
Paul Waldman: Why Republicans demanded that tax break for business lunches
They know that even when they’re comically villainous, Democrats are too disorganized to make them pay a price.
As negotiations over the pandemic relief bill reached their end, Republicans had a demand from which they would not move. No matter what else the package contained, the White House and its Senate allies insisted that it must provide help for one particular struggling and oppressed group: business people who want to write off the entire cost of their meals.
Over 2,000 Americans a day are dying from covid-19, 20 million are out of work, lines at food banks stretch for miles, millions are in danger of losing their homes, and Republicans are worried about whether some Wall Street banker can deduct the entire cost of his three-martini lunch, rather than only 50 percent as current law allows.
According to The Post’s reporting, “Democratic leaders agreed to the provision in exchange for Republicans agreeing to expand tax credits for low income families and the working poor in the final package.”
It’s common for voters to think that politicians do whatever is popular, pandering shamelessly to the whims of the masses. But this is one area where Republicans appear to have an extraordinary commitment to their ideals, even in the face of political risk. Yet the truth is that they are able to work so assiduously to advance the welfare of corporations and the wealthy because they’ve figured out that the risks of doing such unpopular things are far lower than they might be.
Why? It’s a combination of the public’s ignorance and inattentiveness on the one hand, and Democratic fecklessness on the other.
Greg Sargent: Don’t let Mitch McConnell get away with his vile rewriting of history
The story of how we got a deal suggests McConnell will sabotage the recovery next year.
As Congress passed a new $900 billion economic rescue package on Monday night, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) offered a choice bit of spin on how we got to this moment:
“A few days ago, with a new president-elect of their own party, everything changed,” Mr. McConnell said on Monday. “Democrats suddenly came around to our position that we should find consensus, make law where we agree, and get urgent help out the door.”
Getting the story right here is highly consequential. It will shape the arguments that determine the outcome of the Georgia runoffs — and control of the Senate — and should leave little doubt that continued GOP control means McConnell will strive to sabotage the recovery to cripple Joe Biden’s presidency.
This is what McConnell wants to obscure. Because as he has privately admitted, the failure of Congress to deliver a robust aid package to people is putting his Georgia senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue at risk.
So McConnell wants voters — especially those in Georgia — to believe Republicans supported generous aid all along, particularly the stimulus checks in the new deal, and that Democrats refused to act, to harm President Trump’s reelection campaign.
But the reality is that Democrats were the ones pushing for stimulus checks and robust aid all along, even though it would have helped Trump’s reelection, and McConnell and Republicans were the main obstacle.