EASY USELESS ECONOMICSBY PAUL KRUGMANNEW YORK TIMES[I]nventing reasons not to do anything about current unemployment isn’t just cruel and wasteful, it’s bad long-run policy, too. … Every time some self-important politician or pundit starts going on about how deficits are a burden on the next generation, remember that the biggest problem facing young Americans today isn’t the future burden of debt — a burden, by the way, that premature spending cuts probably make worse, not better. … [A]ll this talk about structural unemployment isn’t about facing up to our real problems; it’s about avoiding them, and taking the easy, useless way out. And it’s time for it to stop.ECHOES OF ’67: ISRAEL UNITESBY CHARLES KRAUTHAMMERWASHINGTON POSTThose counseling Israeli submission, resignation or just endless patience can no longer dismiss Israel’s tough stance as the work of irredeemable right-wingers. Not with a government now representing 78 percent of the country. Netanyahu forfeited September elections that would have given him four more years in power. He chose instead to form a national coalition that guarantees 18 months of stability — 18 months during which, if the world does not act (whether by diplomacy or otherwise) to stop Iran, Israel will. And it will not be the work of one man, one party or one ideological faction. As in 1967, it will be the work of a nation.
Must-Read Op-Eds for Thursday, May 10, 2012
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IN FOREIGN POLICY, OBAMA LEARNS ON THE JOBBY DAVID IGNATIUSWASHINGTON POSTWhat’s striking about Obama’s management of foreign policy, as the campaign season opens, is that he knows what he knows. … Obama is beginning to think about what he would do in a second term, and it’s a predictable list — addressing climate change, reducing nuclear weapons, reviving the Palestinian peace process, managing the “Arab Spring” constructively and improving development assistance for Africa. But it isn’t so much the specific things he wants as the one big thing he has learned: how to make decisions in the Oval Office. This sense of having learned on the job is what he’ll try to sell the country come November.LONG, HARD SLOG AGAIN IN PRESIDENTIAL RACEBY MICHAEL BARONEREAL CLEAR POLITICS[W]hen you get the Gallup and Rasmussen tracking polls and the Politico/George Washington University Battleground poll all showing Mitt Romney leading Obama by 1 point, an Obama victory seems far from inevitable. … The bottom line is that at this point Obama doesn’t have an Electoral College lock. Neither does Romney. The numbers tell us that this election is up for grabs. The Obama campaign has prepared for a long, hard slog through the target states. The Romney campaign is getting prepared for the same. … The long, hard slog is the likeliest scenario for 2012.MAKING LOVE OUT OF NOTHING AT ALLBY JOE SCARBOROUGHPOLITICO[T]he impact of Obama’s statement may not be so positive in the long run for America’s top newspapers and networks. They continue to be enablers of a liberal politician who has long played a cynical game on an issue critical to most who run those same media outlets. Is a Democratic victory in November really that important to these journalists or are they just blinded by love? The only thing that the statement by the president proved is that those same news organizations are now defending a position on gay marriage that would make Bill Buckley proud.
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