The Target of the “Border Adjustment Tax” is You

Federal_Debt-VS-Taxes
Federal_Debt-VS-Taxes (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“[O]n life support,” says US Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) of the “Border Adjustment Tax,” proposed during last year’s GOP presidential primaries  by US Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) and backed by Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-WI). If the idea is indeed dead, American workers and consumers should heave a sigh of relief. It’s a very bad idea, in more ways than one.

The BAT is promoted as a “tax on imports.” Which, I guess, is technically accurate, but doesn’t tell the whole story. It’s not just a tax on  imports. It’s a tax on people who buy the imports. That is, it’s a tax on you.

For obvious reasons, retail merchants don’t like the idea very much. It would force them to raise prices on lots of items. Which is the same reason you shouldn’t like it, unless you like paying more for stuff than you pay now.

For equally obvious reasons, some American manufacturers love  the Border Adjustment Tax. Every extra dollar you have to pay in tax for something made abroad is a dollar they don’t have to find ways to cut from their manufacturing costs to compete on price. For them it’s the equivalent of running a race in which their competitors have to carry backpacks full of lead and they don’t.

The politicians behind the idea love it because it would let them give their business cronies a huge tax cut — reducing the corporate tax rate from 35% to 20% — without reducing government spending.

Ultimately American consumers pay both types of taxes, of course, but the BAT would shift the burden to customers who buy goods made in China, Mexico, South Korea, Pakistan and so on, hurting retailers who sell those things in order to subsidize American manufacturers at everyone else’s expense.

All this talk of “tax reform” is just smoke and mirrors, a way of disguising the reality that every dollar government spends has to come from somewhere, and that that somewhere is taxation. Borrowing money is just promising to tax later. Inflating the currency is just a hidden tax.

Shifting the tax burden around with tricks like a “Border Adjustment Tax” isn’t real reform, it’s just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. The first step in any meaningful reform is for Congress to commit to spending no more money than it takes in. The second is for it to start taking in less.

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 HISTORY

Florida’s Shenanigans Make a Great Case for (Re-)Separation of Ballot and State

Ballot

In mid-February, Florida’s Division of Elections stripped the state’s third largest political party of its official recognition. Tallahassee’s excuse for ending the Independent Party’s ability to put candidates on the ballot and disenfranchising its 260,000-plus registered voters? The party organization’s 2014 financial audit wasn’t conducted by a Certified Public Accountant.

Florida law doesn’t specify any such CPA requirement, and even if it did this dirty trick would exemplify the real purpose of so-called “ballot access laws”: To safeguard the Republican and Democratic Parties’ near-complete control of American elections.

In every election cycle, “third” parties shell out big bucks just to be allowed to present their candidates to voters. According to Nicholas J. Sarwark, chair of the Libertarian Party’s national committee, the party, its state affiliates, and its presidential campaign spent more than $750,000 on ballot access — that is, on jumping through bureaucratic hoops instead of on getting its message out — in 2016.

It shouldn’t be that way. It doesn’t have to be that way. And it wasn’t always that way.

Some histories of the Civil War era mention that Abraham Lincoln was “not even on the ballot” in several southern states. That’s true. None of the other presidential candidates were “on the ballot” either, nor was Lincoln “on the ballot” in the northern states. There was no such thing as “on the ballot.”

American ballot access laws only date back to the 1880s. Before that, voters cast ballots in one of three ways: They received ballots from and printed by their political parties of choice, they wrote out their own ballots by hand, or, if they couldn’t write, they verbally dictated their choices to election officials who wrote down those choices for them in the presence of witnesses.

Once state governments overthrew those methods in favor of “Australian” ballots — standardized ballots printed by the governments themselves — the next step was feigned concern over  “voter confusion” from “too many” candidates, quickly followed by the erection of barriers to “solve” the “problem.”

These days ballot access laws are so many, so varied and so confusing that there’s an entire industry centered around helping parties and candidates interpret and meet the guidelines. There’s even a dedicated publication, Ballot Access News, dedicated to sorting out ballot access laws on a continuing basis.

And, once again, it’s important to keep in mind the real purpose of these laws: To ensure that, with rare exceptions, only Republicans and Democrats are elected to public office. Or, to put it more plainly, to protect those parties from the risks of free and fair elections.

The states and the establishment parties have proven, over and over, that they can’t be trusted with control of ballot access. Time to take that control away.

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 HISTORY

Trump: Triumph of the Permanent Campaign

English: Donald Trump speaking at CPAC 2011 in...
English: Donald Trump speaking at CPAC 2011 in Washington, D.C. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Less than a month into the first term of his presidency, Politico reports, Donald Trump appears to be back on the campaign trail, heading for Melbourne, Florida and one of his signature airport hangar rallies.

The Washington Post‘s Philip Bump speculates that Trump’s outing is motivated by the simple need for an ego boost. It’s been a rough month. Heck, it’s been a rough week, marked by the resignation of National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, and the withdrawal of Labor Secretary nominee Andy Puzder, under shadows of different kinds. Rallies feel like … victory. Trump knows how to pack a house and pump it full of feelgood, taking away even more energy from his performances than he brings to them.

I’ve got an alternative theory: Donald Trump is the consummate politician.

Granted, he ran for president as “not a politician.” But there’s less to that image than meets the eye. Beneath the hype, hard reality: Donald Trump whipped 16 rivals for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, then went on to best an “inevitable” former First Lady, former US Senator, and former US Secretary of State in the general election. Some “non-politician.”

One of the losing candidate’s long-time confidants, Sidney Blumenthal, identified an interesting modern political phenomenon in a 1980 book, The Permanent Campaign. Blumenthal’s thesis was that the political center of gravity has moved over time away from the smoke-filled party/patronage rooms — stable long-term concerns — and toward a constant short-term concern with more mercurial factors like poll numbers and public perception.

Trump is well-known for his hyper-sensitivity to being perceived as anything less than top dog in every respect. He decries negative press and polling as biased and can’t wait to tout his latest triumph, even if he has to invent it himself (see, for example “inaugural attendance figures”).

It’s time to stop thinking of that as a character defect and recognize it for what it is. Donald J. Trump represents the pinnacle of the “permanent campaign” ethos. He’s all politician, all the time.

Ironically, Trump’s authoritarian stylings may end up producing results closely tracking direct democracy — rule of the majority, or at least the plurality, albeit on a drunken moment-to-moment lurch.

If so, I predict that his presidency, whether one term or two in duration, will validate HL Mencken’s conception of democracy as “the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

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 HISTORY