All posts by Thomas L. Knapp

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Budgets, Taxes, Deficits and Debt; or, Mulvaney Versus the Math

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English: South Carolina State Senator Mick Mul...
South Carolina State Senator (now director of the US Office of Management and Budget) Mick Mulvaney speaking in front of a crowd in Newberry, SC, in August of 2010 during his run for the U.S. House of Representatives. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“What you see in this budget is exactly what the president ran on,” US Office of Management and Budget director Mick Mulvaney told George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “Good Morning America” in late February.

The president’s overall budget proposal is still under wraps and hasn’t been sent to Congress yet, but Mulvaney was making the media rounds to flack for its first big component: A $54 billion increase in military spending.

Mulvaney’s claim is true as far as it goes. Donald Trump ran for president on a promise to “rebuild” the most expensive war machine in the world, a “defense” establishment that hasn’t missed a meal since World War Two and that, if cut by 90%, would still be the first or second largest in the world (depending on what China spends from year to year).

Mulvaney didn’t look very happy about it. I don’t blame him. As Stephanopoulos pointed out, Trump made a few other promises, too — and those promises represent an insoluble math problem for the numbers guy.

On one hand, in addition to the increased defense spending, Trump wants a $1 trillion infrastructure program and he’s pledged not to touch Social Security or Medicare spending.

On the other hand, he’s promised to cut taxes.

Even if his hands weren’t so famously small, they’d have trouble holding on to both sets of promises while juggling two more in the air: He’s promised to reduce the federal government’s annual spending deficit and pay down its gigantic debt.

Yes, the “Laffer Curve” predicts the possibility of increased government revenues from general economic growth after tax cuts,  but those numbers still just don’t add up. It’s not possible to spend more, and tax less, and pay down crippling debt, and bring a runaway budget into balance.

Unless Trump and Republicans in Congress are willing to buckle down and get serious about spending cuts (if you’re not serious about cutting military spending, you’re not serious about cutting spending) Mulvaney’s real job for the next four years won’t be balancing budgets, it  will be making excuses.

Fortunately for Trump, he has considerable relevant business experience that he can bring to bear on the problem.

Unfortunately for the rest of us, that experience is in the casino industry where, no fewer than four times, he spent enterprises into insolvency then left his partners holding the bankruptcy bag.

I predict that his presidency will bring that number to five.

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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The War on Marijuana is Ending. Disarm Jeff Sessions.

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FreeImages.com/Mateusz Atroszko
FreeImages.com/Mateusz Atroszko

Jeff Sessions doesn’t “think America is going to be a better place when more people of all ages and particularly young people start smoking pot.” He’s worried about the possibility of “marijuana being sold at every corner grocery store.” Because, you see, “good people don’t smoke marijuana.”

America disagrees.

A majority of US states (28) have modified their laws to recognize the medical benefits of cannabis over the last two decades. More recently voters in eight of those states, representing 25% of the population of the United States, have chosen to substantially legalize recreational use as well, and a solid majority of voters in the other states support the idea of doing likewise.

The writing is on the wall: The war on marijuana is ending, and freedom won. Sessions can’t undo that any more than the Ku Klux Klan was able to undo Appomattox.

Unfortunately, as the newly confirmed Attorney General of the United States, he does enjoy a great deal of Klan-like power to continue terrorizing the millions victimized by his side during its 80-year war on a benign and useful plant.

It’s time for Congress to take away that power.

In an ideal world, doing so would entail the repeal of all federal narcotics laws and the elimination of the Drug Enforcement Agency and Office of National Drug Control Policy.

Realistically those developments are probably decades away, but there’s a bare minimum baseline of acceptable congressional response to the will of the people and the prerogatives of the states:

First, Congress must remove marijuana from the DEA’s “scheduling” of drugs under the Controlled Substance Act.

Secondly, Congress must use its power of the purse to de-fund, prohibit, and if necessary punish, any future DEA/ONDCP enforcement or propaganda activity relating to marijuana.

And there’s no time like the president: The new president claimed on the campaign trail to respect the states’ decisions on the matter, and he’s also calling for cuts of “waste, fraud and abuse” from federal discretionary spending. The war on marijuana clearly answers to all three descriptions.

Four US Representatives — Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), Don Young (R-AK), Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) and Jared Polis (D-CO) launched a “Cannabis Caucus” in mid-February to begin the urgent task of winding down the failed federal war on marijuana. That’s four out of 435. If your alleged representative hasn’t joined the caucus yet, maybe you should call his or her district office and ask why.

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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The Immigration Enforcement Police State is Here

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English: ICE Special Agents (U.S. Immigration ...
English: ICE Special Agents (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) arresting suspects during a raid (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

February 7: Muhammad Ali, Jr., returning to the US from a speaking engagement in Jamaica, is detained for two hours at Florida’s Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport and questioned about his name and religious beliefs.

February 22: Passengers disembarking from a domestic (San Francisco to New York) flight at JFK airport are held up by US Customs and Border Protection agents demanding their IDs.

February 24: Jeffrey Tucker of the Foundation for Economic Education clears the usual security checks at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta Airport en route to Mexico. Then, while actually boarding the plane, he and the other passengers on the flight are stopped by US Marshals demanding that they submit to retinal scans.

You’re probably thinking that this is the point where I’ll take a break to blame Donald Trump. It isn’t. It’s the point where I’ll take a break to remind Americans who’ve been voting for politicians who promise to “secure the border” and other such authoritarian nonsense that THIS is exactly what they’ve been voting for.

When advocating for the libertarian position on immigration (“open borders,” which also happens to have been the position Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush both took in the 1980 Republican presidential primary debates) I usually prefer to stick to the moral argument. That argument, put simply, is that where peaceful people move to, settle or work is nobody’s business but theirs.

But there are practical arguments against America’s increasingly draconian immigration laws too.  Enforcement is expensive but, fortunately, almost certain to be ineffectual (if it worked, severe economic downturn would be the result).

The most important of the practical arguments, in my opinion, is that a police state built to persecute immigrants will necessarily persecute everyone else as well.

I’ve spoken with friends who traveled in the old Soviet Union and eastern Europe before the Berlin Wall came down. They see near-complete similarity between those regimes and the operations of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection and Border Patrol forces.

The difference between pre-reunification East Germany and the 100-mile wide “constitution-free zone” along the US-Mexico border is the flag the agencies in question salute. Recent administrations have worked to expand that zone to cover the entire country and the Trump administration seems bent on finishing the job.

The near-total police state blossoming before our eyes is the inevitable result of America’s 70-year romance with the astoundingly stupid idea that it’s the government’s business to monitor and control who travels, lives and works where.

America had legally open borders for its first century as a nation, and nearly so for half a century after that. It wasn’t until after World War Two that one even needed a passport to enter or leave the United States.

Open borders worked. Freedom worked.

The subsequent seven decades of attempts at rigorous immigration control have irrefutably established that our choice is not between open borders and closed borders, but between immigration freedom or totalitarian government. And Americans’ time to stop the stampede toward the latter is running short.

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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