All posts by Thomas L. Knapp

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Social Security: An Inconvenient Truth

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English: Scanned image of author's US Social S...
Social Security card. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The first “top ten” Republican presidential nomination debate consisted almost entirely of empty calories, and it’s easy to see why. The event was put on by Fox “News,” its dominating presence was Donald Trump, and its focus was, simply, on who could get most militaristic about Iran and immigration.

Issues of substance? Fuhgeddaboudit … except for one brief exchange between New Jersey governor Chris Christie and former Arkansas governor (and Fox talk show host) Mike Huckabee. Between the two of them, they revealed the narrow and dangerous range of thinking on the future of Social Security that characterizes both major American political parties. Even Bernie Sanders, allegedly a fire-breathing socialist, can’t seem to think outside that range on Social Security. A quick roundup of the positions:

Huckabee thinks that Social Security can and should be “saved” by switching from progressive federal income taxation to the “Fair” Tax, a 30% national sales tax.

Christie thinks that Social Security can and should be “saved” by increasing the retirement age by two years over a period of 25 years (i.e. every year or so, the retirement age goes up by one month) and “means testing” (i.e. stopping Social Security checks to senior citizens with retirement incomes in excess of $200k and $4 million in liquid assets).

Sanders thinks that Social Security can be “saved” by un-capping the tax that supports it. Right now, only the first $118,500 of each individual’s income is taxed for Social Security purposes. Sanders wants to remove that ceiling.

Social Security has long, and rightly, been characterized as the “third rail” of American politics. Those who touch it tend to die spectacularly gruesome political deaths. It has to be talked about, but nobody’s willing to talk about it outside the context of “saving” it.

That fear may be justified, but it’s also incredibly bad for America.

The ratio of retirees to current tax-paying workers is inverting — Baby Boomers are retiring, having had fewer children than their own parents.

Social Security’s  “trust fund” consists entirely of IOUs from a government already more than $18 trillion in debt and showing no signs of ever learning fiscal responsibility.

None of the gimmicks proposed by the likes of Huckabee, Christie and Sanders changes those fundamentals.  Even Social Security’s trustees predict insolvency by 2035, and their bookkeeping looks suspiciously optimistic.

Here’s what the politicians don’t want to tell you: Social Security is going to end.

Even if the US government hadn’t operated it as a Ponzi scheme, spending its revenues and paying old claims from new revenues, the demographic changes of the last 50 years would have made it untenable. And even absent those demographic changes, well, Ponzi schemes always collapse sooner or later.

It’s going to end. The only choice is whether it ends with a bang (total collapse and sudden mass destitution among the elderly) or a whimper (phasing it out with minimum possible harm to those counting on it).

Any politician who tells you otherwise is lying to you.

Thomas L. Knapp 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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August 1945: Let’s Talk About Terrorism

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Nagasaki, Japan. September 24, 1945, 6 weeks a...
Nagasaki, Japan. September 24, 1945, 6 weeks after the atomic bomb attack on that city, the second atomic blast in history. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

On August 6, 1945, the United States of America became the first — and, to this day, the only — nation to use atomic or nuclear weapons in actual hostilities (as opposed to testing). The unconditional surrender of Japan quickly followed, bringing an end to World War II.

For 70 years now, the anniversaries of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings have occasioned debate on whether or not those bombings were necessary, and whether or not they were justifiable.

Many World War II veterans  — and others — stand on simple necessity to justify the bombings. A US invasion of Japan’s home islands, they argue, would have entailed a million or more US military casualties, and even more Japanese civilian casualties than are attributed to the atomic attacks.

The argument is facially persuasive.  As of August 1945, my grandfather and my wife’s father were both serving in the US Navy in the Pacific.  There certainly existed a non-trivial likelihood that either or both of them would have died in subsequent battles had the war not ended. For obvious reasons, we’re grateful they came home alive.

The persuasiveness of the argument fades when we consider the facts: Conditional surrender had been on offer since late 1944, the condition being that Emperor Hirohito remain on the throne. The US fought two of the war’s bloodiest battles — Iwo Jima and Okinawa, at a cost of tens of thousands of Americans killed — then unleashed Little Boy and Fat Man on Japan’s civilian population, rather than accept that condition. But once the war was over, Hirohito was allowed to remain Emperor.

That aside, words mean things, and neither our happiness at our ancestors’ survival nor any military argument for insisting on unconditional surrender and dropping atomic bombs to get it changes the character of what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Terrorism, per WordNet, is “the calculated use of violence (or the threat of violence) against civilians in order to attain goals that are political or religious or ideological in nature.” The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings meet that definition in spades.

US president Harry S. Truman  ordered, consciously and with premeditation, the murder of somewhere between 100,000 and 250,000 civilians in pursuit of his political goal of unconditional  Japanese surrender.

Whether or not an act constitutes terrorism doesn’t depend on whether or not its goals are laudable. Every terrorist and supporter of terrorism in history, save a handful of thorough nihilists, has justified his or her atrocities on the basis of the desired outcomes, claiming that a few innocent lives sacrificed now means more innocent lives saved later.

But innocent lives are not ours to sacrifice. Murder is murder and terrorism is terrorism, no matter what nationalist or patriotic colors we wrap them up in and no matter what ribbon of “necessity” we stick atop them.

Even if we accept the “necessity” argument for the murders at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they remain something to regret and to mourn, not something to justify or to celebrate.

Thomas L. Knapp 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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Twenty-Five Years Later: A Look Back at “The Other Good War”

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English: Destroyed LAV-AT by friendly anti-tan...
US LAV-AT destroyed by “friendly fire” during the Battle of Khafji in Operation Desert Storm.  (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

On August 2, 1990, the Iraqi army invaded Kuwait, a tiny Persian Gulf emirate. Three days later, US president George HW Bush fielded questions from reporters on the South Lawn of the White House. The key line from, and substance of, those remarks: “This will not stand, this aggression against Kuwait.”

Two days after that, Operation Desert Shield commenced with the arrival of US troops in Saudi Arabia. Desert Shield transitioned into Desert Storm — a short, sharp, successful air and ground attack resulting in the ejection of Saddam Hussein’s troops from Kuwait.

The early days of this military adventure were marked by spirited debate on its merits and trepidation over the possibility of large-scale chemical warfare and mass US casualties.

But by late May of 1991, when I returned home from my tour of duty as a Marine infantry NCO, the war seemed an unqualified success. Saddam’s forces had been routed with fewer than 300 Americans killed and only 800 wounded.

Parades were held. Medals were awarded. Returning troops in uniform got free beer at airport bars. Yes, really — I drank my Budweiser on layover at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago. And I drank the Kool Aid that followed, too: Desert Storm had blown away the dark cloud cover of Vietnam and looked set to go down in history as a “good war” not unlike World War II.

How quickly many of us, myself included, forgot that World War II had led to 45 years of “cold war” with “hot” interspersions in Korea and Vietnam, turning America into a permanent garrison state. And little did we know that 25 years after Desert Storm we, too, would find ourselves looking back at a similar alternation between “cold” and “hot,” featuring more American dead on 9/11 than at Pearl Harbor, thousands of casualties in ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and an emerging police state that puts old East Germany to shame.

These days on anniversaries like this, I still break out some fond memories of camaraderie and esprit de corps, but those memories are overshadowed by regret and by resolve to help my country break the cycle of military and foreign policy adventurism. Those false gods have proven themselves unworthy of the human sacrifices they demand.

Only by refashioning America into John Quincy Adams’s vision of it — “[S]he goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own” — can we hope to dismount this merry-go-round of death and realize our potential as a land of the free. That’s a far worthier goal than any transitory military victory.

Thomas L. Knapp 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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