All posts by Thomas L. Knapp

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Trump’s Security Tab: A Good Case for Separation of Church and State

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Photo of President Bush with Secret Service Ag...
Photo of President Bush with Secret Service Agents, Presidential Limousine and Air Force One. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Palm Beach County, Florida Commissioner Dave Kerner wants to tax a resort. Nothing unusual about that — politicians love to mug tourists in the name of “economic development” —  except that the resort in question is Mar-a-Lago, US president Donald Trump’s private club and preferred getaway spot when he tires of the White House.

Kerner complains that Trump’s visits cost the county government $60,000 a day in police overtime and other expenses and wants to turn the resort into a “special taxing district” to claw back that money.

Business owners at the local airport have complaints as well. The Secret Service shuts them down whenever Trump’s in the neighborhood, costing them thousands. A new tax doesn’t address those complaints. What’s really needed is some good old-fashioned separation of church and state.

Every time a president goes anywhere, a giant, expensive, purpose-built security apparatus goes with him. And when he gets there, entire city governments drop whatever they’re doing to shut down the streets and ensure that the Divine Presence remains undisturbed by the presence and activities of mere mortals.

The national media issues breathless breaking news reports, followed by endless updates, whenever some idiot climbs over the White House fence and profanes the sacred grass of the North Lawn with the soles of his unconsecrated shoes.

Treating presidents and former presidents as God-Kings at taxpayer expense violates the First Amendment’s establishment clause. It’s ceremonial observance of an official state religion, a religion the Libertarian Party’s Statement of Principles calls “The Cult of The Omnipotent State.”

In theory, the president is just a mere citizen, the guy we elected to do a particular job.

Why should he be entitled to any more personal security at taxpayer expense than you or me?

Why should the highways that we all pay for be closed to us whenever he happens to want to barge through with his motorcade?

Why should people with plans to fly — commercially or privately — be held up for hours or days just because that plane landing over there happens to be Air Force One?

No reason at all, unless you’re of a religious bent.

Instead of enacting a new tax on Mar-a-Lago, Palm Beach County’s government should inform Donald Trump that there will be no special police accommodations for his presence, and tell the Secret Service that attempts to shut down the airport will earn them free accommodations at the county’s correctional facility.

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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Income Tax: No Honor Among Thieves

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Former US congressman (and presidential candidate) Ron Paul kept a placard on his desk reading “don’t steal — the government hates competition.” Unfortunately for taxpayers, that competition is getting more frequent and more bold. According to US News and World Report, nearly a quarter of a million taxpayers filed affidavits claiming identity theft in 2016, while the IRS stopped nearly 800,000 more fraudulent tax returns.

On April 6, Internal Revenue Service commissioner Josh Koskinen informed the US Senate that fraud-enabling information on as many as 100,000 taxpayers may have been compromised via an application allowing students applying for financial aid to import their tax data. This single breach seems to have produced more than 20,000 fraudulent tax returns, only 2/3 of which were caught ($30 million in “refunds” were sent out).

How did we get here? It’s a long story, starting in 1913 (with the 16th Amendment and the creation of a federal income tax, which initially applied to only a few of the richest Americans) and passing through World War Two when more and more people got hit up and government economists (including a young Milton Friedman, later an icon of the libertarian movement) came up with the idea of “withholding” tax revenues from paychecks instead of just collecting once a year.

The average American worker gets robbed on a weekly basis. His or her employer, acting on behalf of the IRS, skims a portion off the top of each paycheck. In a gesture of seeming magnanimity, the gang hands some of the loot back over each year to nearly eight out of ten victims — but only after the victims spend considerable time and/or money filling out paperwork, due by mid-April (this year, on the 18th).

Is it any surprise that competing thieves would look for ways to game a trillion-dollar-plus scheme that pays out (as of 2015) $278 billion in refunds? According to the Department of the Treasury, “[a]s of May 2, 2015, the IRS reported that it identified 163,087 tax returns with more than $908.3 million claimed in fraudulent refunds and prevented the issuance of approximately $787 million (86.6 percent) in fraudulent refunds.”

Even if the IRS is completely correct about how many fraudulent returns were filed and how many were caught, that’s a $121 million payday for the IRS’s freelance counterparts. That’s a drop in the bucket compared to what the IRS itself steals, but it ain’t chump change.

Fortunately, income tax refund fraud is an easy problem to fix. The smaller scheme depends on the bigger one. Repeal the income tax and the problem solves itself!

Minus the income tax, other existing federal income taxes would fund Washington at spending levels typical of the late 1990s. I don’t remember running into anyone back then who claimed that government was too small. Do you?

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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We’re Asking The Wrong Questions About Syria

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Billboard with portrait of Assad and the text ...
Billboard with portrait of Assad and the text God protects Syria on the old city wall of Damascus 2006 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As I write this, two key questions remain unanswered, and a third mostly unasked, about a deadly daybreak  attack on Khan Sheikhoun, a northwest Syrian city of (pre-war) 50,000. Hundreds were wounded and as many as 100 killed, apparently chemical weaponry (Turkey’s health ministry believes the agent in question was the nerve gas sarin), on the morning of April 4.

The two most obvious questions are who did this, and why?

The US government (and unfortunately most American media, acting as stenographers rather than journalists as is too often the case in matters of war and foreign policy) have settled on the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad as the culprit. That claim seems very questionable, if for no other reason than that there’s no plausible “why” attached to it.

After more than six years of civil war, the Syrian government has (with Russian assistance) turned the tide. Assad is well on his way to defeating both the Islamic State and the “moderate rebels” (read: al Qaeda) backed by the US, restoring his control over the country.

A chemical attack on  Khan Sheikhoun doesn’t seem to fit into that scenario. Not only does it serve no obvious military objective, but it’s precisely the kind of atrocity that American hawks will latch onto and use as an excuse to continue and escalate the US military intervention in Syria at Assad’s expense.

Cui bono (“who benefits?”) doesn’t always point to the true answer to a question, but in this case it’s reasonable to ask. The Khan Sheikhoun attack may very well have been carried out by the rebels themselves, in an attempt to keep the US entangled in the war, on their side.

Another plausible explanation is that Syrian regime aircraft bombed a rebel facility where the chemical weapons were manufactured or stored, accidentally releasing them. It’s happened before. It’s how a number of American troops, possibly including me, were exposed to sarin during Operation Desert Storm in 1991.

Or maybe it was Assad behind the attack, for some reason beyond the ken of distant observers.

But who and why are the wrong questions. The third question — the  right question — is: Why is the US involved in this war?

The Assad regime has not attacked the US, nor has Congress declared war on Syria. There’s simply no defensive — or for that matter even legal — rationale for a US military presence in Syria. Whatever horrors the civil war there may entail, American military adventurism makes them worse, not better. It perpetuates instability rather than bringing peace.

Donald Trump ran for president on a platform of reducing US military meddling in other countries’ affairs. It’s time for him to follow through and order a US withdrawal from Syria.

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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