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.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

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.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

In 2024, Floridians voted, by a margin of 55.9% to 44.1%, to legalize recreational marijuana. Unfortunately, the threshold for passage of “Amendment 3” was 60% and the measure failed.

So far so bad … but it gets worse.

Nearly two years later we’ve learned that state government officials misappropriated millions of dollars in taxpayer money; funneled it through a charity founded by governor Ron DeSantis’s wife and into Republican PACs operated by the man who later became the state’s attorney general, with the approval of the then sitting attorney general, now a US Senator; and poured it into a campaign to defeat the measure.

We know this because someone leaked a grand jury report on the matter to CBS News Miami.

“Based on the impending ballot initiative, the expedited nature of the movement of these funds  … and the quick disbursement of the funds to their final destination,” the report reads, “we conclude that these funds were misappropriated as part of a sophisticated scheme to fund political activities.”

Unfortunately, the grand jury couldn’t figure out exactly who to charge  with which elements of the criminal conspiracy and didn’t issue indictments: “Nobody will take responsibility for deciding the $10 million of taxpayer money would go to Hope Florida … or had any memory of who made it.”

De Santis’s response to the matter: “The only crime that was apparent was whoever leaked the grand jury report.”

Now-AG James Uthmeier, who seems to have been the central figure running the $10 million embezzlement operation, calls the affair “a politically motivated hoax” which “shows that the Democrats had to collude with the press to break the law.”

It’s not their fault they embezzled taxpayer money to rig an election, see? It’s everybody else’s fault for finding out!

If that grand jury had minded its own business, if that whistleblower had kept the report under wraps, if the media hadn’t told the public about it, IF IT WEREN’T FOR THOSE MEDDLING KIDS … the word that comes immediately to mind is “Clintonesque.”

What’s next?

Hopefully we’ll get a new, more vigorous investigation that finds out who did and knew what, when they did and knew it, and charges those responsible. I hate to leave anything to the federal government, but Florida’s state government is too tightly under the control of the perpetrators for it to get done any other way.

We should also get another vote on the recreational marijuana measure, this time an un-rigged one.

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.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY