All posts by Thomas L. Knapp

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Chickenhawk Donald: A Complete and Total Disgrace

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Cadet Trump
Donald John Trump, pictured on page 107 of his 1964 New York Military Academy yearbook. [Public Domain]
On November 3, US Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who spent five years as a prisoner of the Taliban in Afghanistan, was sentenced to dishonorable discharge, reduction in rank to private, and a $10,000 fine after pleading guilty to charges of desertion and misbehavior before the enemy.

Without hesitation and displaying reckless disregard for his own reputation, US president Donald Trump courageously mounted his keyboard and charged Twitter to pronounce the sentence “a complete and total disgrace to our Country and to our Military.”

There’s certainly a complete and total disgrace to discuss here, but it’s neither Bergdahl nor his sentence. It’s Trump and his hypocrisy.

Although I’m a veteran myself, I don’t consider military service a special qualification for holding public office. In fact, there’s a good case to be made that it’s a handicap (if not for the officeholder, for the public that officeholder claims to serve).

The skills one learns in the armed forces do not speak to political and philosophical questions such as whether or not a war is justifiable. Nor, except at the level of generalship, do they equip one with a grasp of grand strategy. They do, however, feed the entitled attitude and seeming impunity that accompany government employment.

Be that as it may, if there’s anything worse in public office than a proud veteran who learned the wrong lessons, it’s a gutless but grandiose chickenhawk like Donald Trump.

In 2006, 20-year-old Bowe Bergdahl enlisted in the US Coast Guard, but was discharged after 26 days for what the press characterizes as “psychological reasons.” Two years later, despite that record, Bergdahl was allowed to enlist in the US Army and deploy to Afghanistan as an infantry trooper.

On June 30, 2009, Bergdahl left his post in Paktika Province for reasons that remain unclear and disputed. He spent the next five years as a prisoner of the Taliban. Now he’s a dishonorably discharged private with a $10,000 invoice in hand.

Bergdahl may have been delusional, or he may have become disillusioned. His Coast Guard discharge should have made it clear to the Army that he wasn’t cut out for military work. But he at least made the attempt.

Donald Trump styles himself “Commander in Chief.”  As a candidate he called himself “the most militaristic person there is.” He “always felt that” he was in the military because his parents shipped him off to a military school as a teen to curb his bratty behavior. He loves military pomp and pageantry. But he actively avoided military reality when it counted.

Instead of enlisting and putting his vaunted warrior spirit to the test during Vietnam, Trump took five draft deferments: Four for college and one on a claim of “bone spurs” in his feet (they hadn’t stopped him from participating in athletics, of course).

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t blame Trump for avoiding Vietnam. I blame him for not learning a little bit of humility from his experience.

If military service is a standard of fitness, Donald Trump isn’t fit to shine Bowe Bergdahl’s boots.

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.

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Sorry, Republicans: If You’re Not Cutting Spending, You’re Not Cutting Taxes.

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Hundreds (RGBStock)

President Donald Trump and Republican congressional leaders rolled out their new tax plan on November 2. Since all bills must have titles, they’re calling this one “The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.”

Republican “tax reform” theatrics have worn thin over  many months of waiting, but I still prefer a more theatrical title. “A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing” rings true. Four centuries later, Shakespeare’s MacBeth is a better description of the matter than any coming out of Washington, DC.

Yes, there’s plenty of quibbling across the aisle over everything from top rates to the home mortgage interest deduction, but neither party’s politicians seem willing to tackle the most basic, indisputable, and relevant fact: Since Congress isn’t cutting spending, Congress won’t be cutting taxes either.

In 2017, the US government will spend more than $4 trillion. That’s 21.5% of Gross Domestic Product, more than one out of every five dollars in wealth created by the US economy.

In order for that wealth to be spent by the political class, it must first be taken from the productive class. To spend a dollar, one must have a dollar. There are three ways to get the money, and all of them are taxation whether they’re called that or not.

The first and most obvious way, and the way dealt with in “The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,” is through overt taxation. Personal income taxes. Payroll taxes linked to Social Security and Medicare. Capital gains taxes. Corporate taxes.  Tariffs. Etc., etc., ad nauseam.

The second way is borrowing. Government borrowing is more accurately described as deferred taxation. Borrowers have to be paid back. When government borrows a dollar, it is promising its creditors that it will, sooner or later, tax that dollar out of you (or your descendants) to pay back the principal, and that until then it will tax you a little bit each year to keep up interest payments.

The third way is inflation (which is tied to borrowing in ways too complicated and boring for a short column to cover). For all the murky descriptions of what inflation is, it’s simple: The government creates more dollars out of thin air, making each dollar in your pocket worth a little less. Inflation is a tax, too. A sneaky tax, but a tax nonetheless.

For every dollar a government spends, a dollar must be taxed. The only exception to that rule is if the government collapses and leaves its creditors unpaid.

In order for Congress to truly cut taxes, it must first balance the budget, then begin cutting that balanced budget. Until and unless it does so, your taxes can only go down in the political imagination, not in reality.

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.

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Will the Real Populism Please Stand Up?

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Eugène Delacroix - Le 28 Juillet. La Liberté guidant le peuple
Liberty Leading the People by Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863). Source: Wikipedia
Writing at The American Conservative, Mike Lofgren tears into the guts of Billionaire at the Barricades: The Populist Revolution from Reagan to Trump, the latest book by Republican political commentator Laura Ingraham.

Lofgren’s two key points — that Donald Trump is no populist, and that conservatism is not populism  — are well-made. “A cynic,” he writes, “would conclude that the term populism, when applied to Republican politics in 2017, means this: keep the rich up, the poor down, foreigners out, and everybody else distracted by scapegoats. Meanwhile, line your pockets at the public trough … and fill your top posts with enough billionaires to make George W. Bush’s cabinet look like a Soviet Workers’ Council.” The piece is a rewarding read.

Despite his best efforts, however, Lofgren misfires on the most basic question involved. What is populism? He surrenders — it’s “hard to define” — citing various figures left and right to whom the label has been applied but whose ideologies are wildly incompatible one with another.

In fact, populism is quite easy to define. It is the separation of people into two warring classes. Let’s call them “the righteous masses” and “the power elites.” The populist, of course, sides with the righteous masses. It’s as simple as that. But the devil is in the details of defining those two classes.

“Right-wing populism” defines the classes mendaciously. It attempts to split the righteous masses against themselves by defining (as per Lofgren above) civic, ethnic, sexual and gender minorities out of the group and the politically connected wealthy in. It’s the righteous white working class and Donald Trump versus immigrants, blacks, Latinos, and the LGBTQ community.

Since it’s difficult to make a case that traditionally oppressed out groups are the “power elite,” they’re instead portrayed as mere pawns, robots in harness to the real villains. The media. Academia. And, although the message is usually offered in dog whistle code (“the bankers,” “Wall Street”), Jews.

It’s a jalopy held together with intellectual baling wire and running on fear and bigotry, but Trump’s presidency is far from the first time it’s carried a right-wing “populist” where he wants to go.

What would a real populism look like? French writers Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer answered that question in the 19th century. The two classes that matter are the productive class (the “righteous masses” who earn their livings through voluntary labor and exchange) and the political class (the “power elites” who steal their livings through control of, or favors from, the organization of plunder, aka the state).

Race, national origin, language, sexual orientation, gender identity — none of these personal characteristics are relevant to a true populist orientation. The only truly meaningful class distinction is the state and its hangers-on versus the rest of us. Even Karl Marx (who stole class theory from Comte and Dunoyer then mutilated it into a form that murdered millions) understood that the state is “the executive committee of the ruling class.”

Real populism is two things: It is left-wing, and it is libertarian. Trump is neither.

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.

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