Throughout my adult life (starting in the 1980s — yes, I’m THAT old), I’ve been aware of, and occasionally participated in, both boycotts and “buycotts” for political reasons.

Boycott: You don’t like a business’s political affiliations, or that business’s actions conflict with your own political ideas. So you choose to not buy from or sell to that business, and probably tell others why they shouldn’t either.

Buycott: You don’t like the people boycotting a business whose political affiliations or actions match well with your own ideas, so you go out of your way to buy from or sell to that business, and probably tell others why they should, too.

Nothing wrong with any of that in principle.

But over the last decade or so, the boycott/buycott trend feels (to me, anyway) like it’s escalated in velocity and volume. Everything’s political, all the time, and more and more in a “to the barricades!”  way than in a “write a letter to the editor!” way.

It’s all so tedious and hard to keep track of lately.

Am I not eating at Chik-fil-A this week because one of their founders donated to a cause I disagree with, or because I just discovered that there’s a position in their corporate hierarchy that has existed for a couple of years  and that I don’t like (why is it suddenly important just now)? Or am I going out of my way to eat there because I agree with that cause, or like that position or because they apologized to … someone, for … something?

Am I boycotting Bud Light because a woman I don’t like got a decorated can of the stuff? Or am I buying an extra 12-pack of the nasty stuff because I like that woman or am confused and just don’t know what GOOD beer tastes like?

Am I driving PAST Target on my way to buy a bathing suit because some of theirs come in rainbow colors and have special pockets for me to hide my penis in if I don’t want people to know I have one? Or am I intentionally heading straight TO Target because I want to let my rainbow flag fly and maybe “tuck” my member away? Or am I joining the drive-by crowd because Target “gave in” to the people who hate rainbow colors and like penises or whatever?

Trying to come to grips with such questions gives me the feeling that maybe I’m caring just too darn much about stuff that really isn’t very important in the scheme of things.

And, come to think of it, do I even NEED a chicken sandwich, a case of beer (or beer substitute like Bud Light), or a new bathing suit?

Treating everything as an outrage  leaves us perpetually outraged at neighbors we should instead consider having over for dinner, (real) beer, and maybe a swim.

The measure of our humanity isn’t how much we care. It’s the quality of what we choose to care about, and what we do about it.

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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US Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA)’s latest legislative proposal — with several co-sponsors from both sides of the partisan aisle — would require the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to “claw back” compensation paid to bank executives in the three years preceding failure (or FDIC bailout) of the banks they work for.

At the same time, Warren calls it “shameful” to “claw back relief from public servants” — by which she means going back to expecting government employees to pay off their student loans, as part of the brewing “debt ceiling deal” versus president Joe Biden’s pre-election waving of a magic wand that makes debts disappear (apparently the  wand doesn’t work on bank failures).

One thing that immediately stands out about Warren’s conflicting views of Ye Auld Government Claw is that the money she wants the FDIC to take from executives of failed banks wasn’t the FDIC’s in the first place. It belonged to the banks, and was paid to those executives pursuant to work done on contract or agreement. There is no “back” involved here. It’s just wage theft of exactly the same kind she’d feign outrage over if the victims were janitors and the thieves weren’t government agents.

While on the other foot — er, claw — we have people who borrowed money, agreed to pay back the money, spent the money, got what they spent the money on … but Warren finds the idea of the money being “clawed back” in the form of perfectly normal repayment of loans “shameful,” and tries to find a third claw to stick the expression on.

That “claw back” expression seems to be Warren’s word version of a Swiss Army [TM] knife.  Sometimes it’s  positive, sometimes it’s negative, and coming from Warren it seems to mostly just be used to make falsehoods sound true.

Instead of trying to retroactively steal bank employees’ wages for poor decisions (she’d be broke if such a policy applied to her), Warren should be working to reverse the government’s poor decision to have the FDIC pay money it didn’t owe to depositors who held balances well in excess of the amounts insured at e.g. Silicon Valley Bank.

And instead of keeping student loan debtors on the “will there be relief or not?” merry-go-round, she should push harder to just make student loan debt subject to the same bankruptcy conditions as other debt.

But I guess sound ideas like that don’t meet the Senate’s fireworks/theatrics thresholds.

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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Well, here we are: The final scenes of Debt Ceiling Theater 2023. After endless rounds of “tense negotiations,” punctuated by smack talk between the big players and weird Hail Mary proposals from the cheap seats,  US president Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy announced a deal over Memorial Day Weekend.

Congress still has to pass the thing, of course, but chances are they’ll pass, and Biden will sign, SOMETHING before Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen runs out of couch cushions to rifle through for spare change to keep the government running.

Let’s have a look at the deal’s features. The envelope, please?

First, the deal pushes the NEXT debt ceiling dust-up off until January 2025. The standard phrasing for that is “kicking the can down the road,” but I think we need a different metaphor here. This is a political disarmament deal. Both major parties are agreeing that the “national debt” won’t be an issue in the 2024 presidential election. How convenient.

Second, non-“defense” discretionary spending will remain at current levels through 2024 and rise by 1% in 2025. Which, without increases in tax revenue, means that the annual deficit and overall debt will continue to rise (especially as the interest payments on EXISTING debt increase).

And third, “defense” spending will rise by 3.3%, in line with Biden’s budget request.

If you’re not serious about cutting spending, you’re not serious about reducing the deficit or paying down the government’s debt.

And if you’re not serious about cutting “defense” spending — by far the single largest discretionary item in the federal budget — you’re not serious about cutting spending.

Instead of political disarmament deals to ensure nobody gets embarrassed on the 2024 campaign trail, Congress and the President should make a REAL disarmament deal that cuts US military spending by an absolute minimum of 10% per year for the next five years.

If everything else was left alone, applying that 10% annual “defense” cut to debt PRINCIPLE would simultaneously reduce existing funding needs for debt SERVICE, while putting more people and more money back into the productive economy.

Yes, the Department of Defense would remain a bloated money pit even after a 50% total cut — leaving the US in still in first place among worldwide military spenders by far. The eventual reduction should be more along the lines of 90% if actual “national defense” is the metric we want to measure by.

But they’ve got to start somewhere, right?

Or, more likely, finish somewhere: In default.

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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