Three Card Monte. Photo by ZioDave. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

“Only I can make this promise to you,” US president Donald Trump told America from the stage of his party’s weird midterm “convention” event on September 9: “If the Republicans win the House and Senate, I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000.”

Most coverage of Trump’s offer to bribe voters to vote Republican focuses on two things — that yes, it was an offer to bribe voters to vote Republican, and that actually doing it would be a $1.2 trillion+ budget-buster of a bribe, the biggest direct “universal” US government payment in history.

Those elements are obviously worth discussing, but they’re not really unusual. Every politician tries to bribe the voters in every election, even if most don’t do it QUITE so plainly. As for the size, well, Trump has always put great importance on being the first to do this, the one who does that the YUGEest, etc. The next time he just goes “normal, business as usual” will be the first.

I’m more interested in the indisputable fact that the “Trump dividend,” if it happened, wouldn’t be a “dividend” at all. In fact, it would be yet another new tax on the recipients.

A dividend is a share of earnings paid out to a company’s shareholders, generally from a profitable cycle. The United States isn’t a business, you and I aren’t shareholders, and the enterprise isn’t turning a profit — as a matter of fact, it runs continuous deficits and is drowning in accrued debt.

This “Trump dividend” is incredibly unlikely to happen — it would have to be  approved by Congress, and there’s no incentive for Congress, or Trump, to follow through on their end of the bargain once they have what they want — but if it happened, it would be paid for by taxing you at least as much, if not more than, that $5,000.

The taxation probably wouldn’t be direct, since that would be a transparently stupid “give me $5,000 … OK, here’s your $5,000!” transaction.

The taxation would take place through borrowing, which is still a tax on you, only with payment deferred and interest due on a continuing basis until the principal is repaid.

In addition to interest, that added borrowing by the federal government would drive up interest rates on your own borrowing, and the injection of the $1.2 trillion into the economy would inflate the price of everything you buy.

So: Trump is offering to pay you $5,000 and jack your cost of living up, in return for which he’s  demanding your vote and $5,000 plus interest.

If that sounds like a good deal to you, you suck at math and you’re probably a member of the rapidly shrinking “MAGA” base.

I’m not suggesting that you vote Democrat this November. There’s plenty of bribery in that party’s pitch, too, even if the delivery is less brazen. The difference is in demeanor, not content.

None of these politicians can give you anything they aren’t taking, or planning to take, from you. Politics is a scam.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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As of September 8, Forbes reports, more than 100,000 people have signed a petition asking organizers of New York City’s 9/11 Commemoration Ceremony to “carefully consider whether [New York City mayor Zohran] Mamdani’s participation would align with the intention of the ceremony and the expectations of the families most directly affected by the tragedy.”

Coming from family members of people who died in the 9/11 attacks, the petition deserves a respectful hearing, whether the claims about Mamdani’s sentiments, sympathies and past actions ring true or not. They’re the people who lost loved ones. The ceremony is, or should be, for them.

Unfortunately, some less deserving people compulsively run to the front of parades that aren’t about them. One such person is former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani.

“It offends me that he’s coming,” Giuliani said in a weekend interview, following up with claims that Muslims in general want to “take us over” and that Mamdani is “a clear supporter of that.”

At least 32, and possibly more than 60, Muslims died in the 9/11 attacks (excluding the attackers, of course). I wonder what their loved ones think about the guest list at the Commemoration Ceremony?

As for Giuliani, he’s now spent 25 years milking 9/11 for every drop of personal and political benefit he can get out of it, including a run for president in 2008, during which then US Senator Joe Biden of Delaware characterized Giuliani’s every stump speech and question response as “a noun, a verb, and 9/11.”

Let’s take a quick look at Giuliani’s actual record concerning that sad day.

He was elected mayor shortly after a 1993 terror attack on the World Trade Center.

One major recommendation coming out of that attack was to equip the city’s first responders with compatible radio gear such that police officers, firefighters, and paramedics could communicate with each other during such events.  Seven years later, as his second term was ending, that hadn’t been done.

Another recommendation was the creation of a city “crisis management center” to coordinate the response to terror attacks and other major emergencies. He did follow through on that one … and chose the most prominent terror target in the city, the World Trade Center complex (building WTC 7), as the center’s site. On the day of the attacks, the center had to be evacuated due to fire instead of serving the city’s needs.

Afterward, he capered around the country calling himself “America’s mayor,” while rushing the site cleanup such that many victims’ remains went unrecovered, and declaring the site “safe” despite significant environmental hazards —  skimping on safety and causing more deaths among cleanup workers from illness than were caused by the attacks themselves.

By 2007, Giuliani was the one victims’ families didn’t want at their events, and for good reason.  He’d used them as backdrops for his constant antics instead of treating them with respect. And he never gives up trying to make that day all about Rudy Giuliani. What Rudy Giuliani thinks. Whether Rudy Giuliani’s “offended.” Quick, someone buy Rudy Giuliani an ice cream cone.

The actual loved ones of the actual victims are entitled to hold their days of remembrance without being used as props. And after 25 years of pointless and murderous wars, increasing domestic police statism, and fake “patriotic” caterwauling, all using 9/11 as the launchpad,  it’s long past time to start ignoring Giuliani and his ilk.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Andrew Langer’s “What JD Vance Gets Wrong About Hamilton” (The Wall Street Journal, August 28) could as aptly have been titled “What JD Vance Gets Wrong About Milton Friedman.”

Langer notes that Hamiltonian trade barriers were “generally moderate” in comparison with “President Trump’s sweeping protectionism,” but is just as concerned that “Mr. Vance also caricatures Friedman’s legacy by implying that laissez-faire elevates economic development above human dignity” — a distortion needed to justify the shift of American economic conservatism’s lodestar from one to the other as “obviously a good thing.”

Not heeding that, as put in John W. Campbell, Jr.’s Astounding Science Fiction, “the really appropriate epitaph for many and many a man is ‘Why, it’s obvious …’,” Vance’s supposedly self-evident case for reburying the man of monetarism in order to resurrect the man on the money is even more of a departure than the Broadway version’s hip-hop beats.

After all, many of the right and many more of the left have attributed virtually every American ill since the Reagan administration to free trade and deregulation.  Yet Vance argues for Friedman’s obsolescence by contending that his ideas succeeded back then — but only due to “a very rich and powerful institutional Christianity” that has become impoverished enough to require a ten-dollar substitute for its devaluated coinage.

The usual demonization of Friedman posits Margaret Thatcher as a Wicked Witch East of the Atlantic to his Elphaba, ignoring his influence on Estonia and New Zealand. Vance would need to make a stretch to find the “powerful institutional Christianity” responsible for the embrace of international markets in Israel, Singapore or even the India of Usha Vance’s ancestors.  At least it doesn’t seem like Vance is tracing his wife’s success at Yale Law School back to the influence on Gandhi of Leo Tolstoy’s “A Letter to a Hindu.”

Vance could buttress his argument by noting that American deregulation was more thorough, and brought more economic benefits, under faithful Sunday school teacher Jimmy Carter than the divorced Hollywood union boss who followed him.  Yet that would be as awkward for partisan platitudes as recalling that the previous Second Lady who had issued a 1987 jeremiad against a “bizarre occult subculture” which “rejects Judeo-Christian religion, turns good and evil upside down, and rebels against life itself” was not Barbara Bush but Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society author Tipper Gore.

Vance is also unlikely to compare his own adeptness at shedding convictions to what Friedman biographer Alan Ebenstein calls his subject’s “excessively religious phase as a young boy” — “noteworthy because it reflects the natural character of his mind … he tends to got he whole way intellectually or not at all, and seeks order and harmony in the universe. When he was unable to achieve this intellectual state through the logical observation of every detail of Orthodox Judaism in its dietary and other strictures, he dropped religion completely.”

In asserting that Hamilton’s heavy hand rather than a Jeffersonian lighter touch (let alone Adam Smith’s invisible mitt) “will dominate American conservative economic thinking for the future,” Vance isn’t just rebuking Jefferson’s anti-Hamiltonian’s view: “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”  Vance may, to misquote the famous line from F. Scott Fitzgerald, have a first-rate ability to function while holding ten opposed ideas in mind. But all bring a risk of injury to your pocketbook and mobility.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

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