Share the View: Parsing the SOTU

Share The View

THE LATEST OPINIONS FROM BLOOMBERG VIEW

JANUARY 21, 2015 bloombergview.com

POLITICS The Editors: "It's easy to dismiss the president's State of the Union speech as mere words. ... The speech is not quite beside the point -- not yet, anyway. ... One measure of the speech's success is how much (or whether) it reframes the debate." Read more... Mohamed A. El-Erian: "Obama devoted time to economic proposals that have no chance of being approved by the Republican-controlled Congress. Yet he didn't squander the opportunity offered by this widely watched speech." Read more... Mark Whitehouse: President Barack Obama's tax proposals "would have an effect on inequality in the U.S.: The wealthiest 1 percent would pay the most, by far." Read more... Christopher Flavelle: Obama's prescriptions "mostly demonstrate the timidity of the ideas that Democrats are willing to offer." Read more... Megan McArdle: "Obama succeeded, I think, in making himself out as the pragmatic hero of the middle class, against the destructive forces of ideology." The speech was "light, however, on policy details." Read more... Josh Rogin: "I attempt to translate for you the foreign-policy-related portions of President Barack Obama's State of the Union address. ... George W. Bush was dumb on foreign policy, and I'm the opposite of George W. Bush." Read more... Paula Dwyer: "Obama may as well have faced the camera and said, 'Ladies, this one goes out to you.' Obama is proposing half a dozen fairly ambitious ideas to coax women back into the labor force." Read more... Francis Wilkinson: By the time Hillary Clinton announces her presidential campaign, Obama "may have written large chunks of her platform." Read more... Ramesh Ponnuru: "Now that Republicans are in control of both chambers of Congress, what should they do?" Read more... Jonathan Bernstein: "Is partisan disagreement good or bad? ... Disagreement is inherent in democracy because citizens differ in both interests and opinions, as James Madison explained in Federalist 10." Read more... TAXES Justin Fox: "In the U.S. the talk is all about 'inversions,' in which American companies use mergers to move their legal domiciles overseas (even if their headquarters and most of their business stays in the U.S.), thus reducing their tax bills. Past Congresses surely didn't intend for companies to do what they've been doing lately, but the current Congress won't stop them because many lawmakers think U.S. corporate tax rates are too high and the U.S. practice of taxing corporations on their worldwide income unfair." Read more... UKRAINE CRISIS The Editors: "The fighting in Ukraine has returned to an intensity not seen since last summer, and the government claims Russian weapons are once again streaming across the border to support the rebels. So it is a curious moment for the European Union's top foreign policy official to bring up the prospect of normalizing relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin." Read more... RELIGION Leonid Bershidsky: Pope Francis's "rabbits" quote "is nudging the church towards greater acceptance of modern realities, even if it contradicts a rigid interpretation of its canon." Read more... LAW Noah Feldman: "On the surface, there was not much noteworthy about the U.S. Supreme Court's decision today in Holt v. Hobbs except maybe that a Muslim won a religious liberty case in the infidel West. ... Deep in the weeds of the decision, however, lurk signs of a much bigger project being pursued by Justice Samuel Alito and other members of the court." Read more... LATIN AMERICA Mac Margolis: The mysterious death of Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman -- "no suicide note, no gunpowder traces on his hands, apparently no witnesses -- shook the nation. This was a national tragedy compounding another. What happens next will determine if it will also be a travesty."Read more... ECONOMICS Noah Smith: "According to blogger Ana Swanson of the Washington Post, and many other bloggers around the Internet in the past week, Japan's government has been engaged in rosy, optimistic denial over its falling fertility rate. ... There's only one problem: The data show the exact opposite!" Read more... TECH Katie Benner: "Venture capitalists invested $48.3 billion in U.S. startups in 2014, making it the best year, in dollar terms, since 2000, when investors poured $105 billion into private companies, according to the National Venture Capital Association. The most striking revelation from the NVCA report was that a quarter of the money went to late-stage investment rounds." Read more... DECLASSIFIED Josh Rogin: "The U.S. government should immediately close and evacuate the U.S. Embassy in Sana'a, Yemen, according to Senator Dianne Feinstein, the Democratic vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence." Read more... MIDDLE EAST Marc Champion: "The recent photograph of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan descending the staircase of his new palace between rows of soldiers in Ottoman armor has been met with widespread derision, but it's part of a broad and deadly serious attempt to reinvent the Republic of Turkey. ... The derision was misplaced, and fear would be justified." Read more... SPORTS Kavitha A. Davidson: "Legendary Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka seems to have softened. Or least he has seemingly changed his stance on the lawsuit some of his former players brought against the National Football League alleging the indiscriminate dispensing of narcotic painkillers." Read more... ENTERTAINMENT Zara Kessler: "A very white, very male slate of Oscar nominees is a reminder that, despite decades of real change, diversity is still not the norm in Hollywood; it's a headline-generating exception." Read more...