Category Archives: Op-Eds

A Biden-Putin Summit: Jaw-Jaw is Better than War-War

Vice President Joe Biden greets Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin
Vice President Joe Biden greets Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin at the Russian White House, in Moscow, Russia, March 10, 2011. (Official White House Photo by David Lienemann). Public Domain.

On April 13, US president Joe Biden spoke by phone with Russian president Vladimir Putin, whom he has previously referred to, in pot/kettle fashion, as a “killer.” During the call, Biden proposed a summit between the two in the near future.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Russian chess legend and political exile Garry Kasparov denounces the idea: “A summit? With a killer? In one stroke, Mr. Biden gave Mr. Putin exactly what he craves, equal status with the president of the United States.”

Kasparov is mistaken. Putin already enjoys that equal status. He  rules a country spanning two continents, with a population of 150 million. He commands a nuclear arsenal rivaling that of the US, and armed forces of similar size but with a seemingly much better 21st century record of accomplishing their objectives instead of getting bogged down in decades-long “counter-insurgency” and “nation-building” quagmires ending in embarrassing defeats.

Even if we accept as undiluted truth every bad thing Kasparov tells us about Putin — that he’s a dictator kept in power by oligarchs, that he ruthlessly suppresses domestic political opposition, that his regime meddles in US elections and hacks US computer systems, and that his support for independent republics which seceded from Ukraine after the US-backed coup there in 2014 is a de facto invasion and occupation of Ukraine itself — those things establish, rather than contradict, the fact that Putin is a key actor on the world political stage.

Nor, no matter what we think of Putin, can we deny that the Russian Federation would have real and vexing grievances with the US whether he was running things or not.

In 1990, as eastern Europe’s communist regimes began to disintegrate, western diplomats assured their Russian counterparts that peaceful dissolution of the Warsaw Pact would not result in NATO’s expansion eastward.  They broke their word. NATO has since gobbled up much of the territory in question, impinging Russia’s sphere of influence and massing militarily on its borders. From the Russian perspective, the pro-NATO coup in Ukraine was apparently the last straw.

At the moment, the Russia-Ukraine conflict is more or less  “frozen.” But if it thaws toward war pitting US and NATO troops against Russian forces there likely won’t be any winners.

In 1958, British prime minister Harold Mcmillan, paraphrasing predecessor Winston Churchill, held that “jaw-jaw is better than war-war.” He was right. Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin need to have a long, serious talk.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) 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.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Congressional Democrats to Biden: Pour Some SALT on That Infrastructure

As the debate over President Joe Biden’s infrastructure proposals heats up, Roll Call reports that “[a] new caucus pressing for repeal of the $10,000 limitation on state and local tax deductions boasts the support of more than one-third of Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee.”

The SALT cap, implemented when Donald Trump was president and the GOP still held congressional majorities, is a “man bites dog” issue that places Democrats and Republicans opposite their usual supposed sides.

Simply put, the SALT deduction allows you to deduct state and local taxes from your “gross adjusted” income for federal tax purposes. The SALT cap limits those deductions to $10,000 per year.

Republicans usually posture as advocates of low taxes, especially on the upper end of the income scale, reasoning from the Reagan-era “supply side” (or what Democrats sardonically call “trickle-down”) premise that doing so encourages investment and creates “a rising tide that lifts all boats.”

Democrats usually advocate making wealthier Americans pick up “their fair share” of government’s tab, a “fair share”  they tend to define as bigger, both in raw numbers and as income percentages, for the wealthier  (Republicans sardonically call it “soaking the rich”).

When it comes to the SALT cap, though, the parties  (mostly — New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a notable exception to the rule) switch sides, and some are willing to hold the infrastructure deal hostage over it.

Why? Because an unlimited SALT deduction means that state governments get a sort of free ride on their own tax rates. A wealthy New Yorker or Californian who pays, say, $50,000 in state taxes can knock that $50,000 off of her federal taxable income.

The $10,000 SALT cap might encourage that wealthy New Yorker or Californian to consider moving out of New York or California, to a state with lower taxes (Florida or Texas, for example) and taking her prospective state tax payments with her.

It’s no accident that the two high-tax states I mention are “blue” Democratic states and the two low-tax states  are “red” Republican states. The two parties’ tax philosophies are, generally speaking, mirrored at the state level.

The ability to move between states is way of “pricing” tax policy. Too high, people move out. Low enough, people move in. The SALT cap encourages people and their wealth to move from “blue” states to “red” states.

It’s shouldn’t surprise anyone that in this case, the Republican line becomes “make them pay their fair share!” while the Democratic line becomes “not like THAT!”

I don’t like taxes. You probably don’t either.  But if we’re going to have them, federal tax policy shouldn’t be manipulated to artificially benefit tax-happy state governments. The SALT deduction shouldn’t be capped. It should be eliminated.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) 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.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Joe Biden Reaffirms Washington’s Message to the World: Never, Ever Trust Us

3rd Battalion, 3rd Marines - Afghanistan
3rd Battalion, 3rd Marines — Afghanistan. Photo by Corporal James L. Yarboro, USMC. Public Domain.

In February 2020, US President Donald Trump announced a peace deal with the Taliban, giving US forces 15 months to get out of Afghanistan. Nearly a year later, with  the withdrawal nearly complete and only 2,500 US armed forces members remaining on Afghan soil, incoming President Joe Biden took the oath of inauguration and instantly began complaining that the May 1 deadline would be “hard to meet.”

The claim is silly on its face. The US military is great at moving people. Eight months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, US Marines waded ashore at Guadalcanal. Five months after Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, the US had moved 697,000 troops to the theater of operations for what became Operation Desert Storm. For any competent commander, moving 2,500 troops from Point A to Point B is a weekend hobby project, not a major undertaking. All Biden had to do was give the order.

On February 13, the White House leaked a new date: September 11, 20th anniversary of the attacks that President George W. Bush cited as casus belli for what was supposed to be a short, sharp war to liquidate al Qaeda in Afghanistan, but quickly turned into a 20-year failed (and deadly) “nation-building” project.

Should we be surprised? Well, no. Biden is just following in the footsteps of his predecessors. Given the long, sorry record of US perfidy, the Taliban shouldn’t be surprised either.

“The United States acknowledge the lands reserved to the Oneida, Onondaga and Cayuga Nations,” reads Article II of the Treaty of Canandaigua, ratified by the US Senate in 1795. “[T]he United States will never claim the same nor disturb them.”

Between then and 1868, the United States continuously negotiated, then sooner or later violated, hundreds of treaties with the continent’s native tribes. By 1920, the extent of Oneida land “acknowledged” in the Treaty of Canandaigua had been reduced from six million acres to 32.

Abroad, the US government takes a similar tack, always treating other parties’ agreed obligations as non-negotiable and its own such obligations as optional.

The Non-Proliferation Treaty requires the US to work toward getting rid of its nuclear arsenal. Instead, recent administrations have gone in the other direction with a focus on “modernizing” that arsenal, while demanding that the Iranian regime go beyond its NPT obligations … then defaulting on its end of THAT deal, too.

As David A. Koplow of the Georgetown University Law Center points out, the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention required the US to destroy its chemical weapons stockpiles by 2012. At last check, the US Army promises to get that done … in 2023.

Also per Koplow, the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations requires governments to inform foreign arrestees of their right to communicate with their countries’ consuls and seek assistance. The US demands that of other governments when Americans are arrested abroad, and routinely “forgets” its own such duty when foreigners are arrested in the US.

At this point, no one should be surprised when the US government lies. It would be far more surprising if Joe Biden told the truth for once.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) 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.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY