Writing at the Florida Politics blog, A.G. Gancarski reports on three sales tax “holiday” bills working their way through the state’s legislature. Two of the bills would lengthen existing holidays on school supplies and storm preparedness products. The third would expand the holiday habit to hunting and fishing items.

According to the Sales Tax Institute,  at least 16 states have sales tax holidays scheduled this year on goods ranging from clothing to school supplies to generators to guns.

I’m all for lower taxes, but tax holidays aren’t about lower taxes. They’re about three things: Social engineering, political grandstanding, and special interest pandering.

Social engineering entails using the tax code to encourage some particular spending versus other kinds of spending.

If I offer a tax deduction for contributions to your favorite church, but not for payments to your favorite liquor store, I’m trying to encourage you to go to church and/or discourage you from boozing. Requiring you to pay  sales tax on a lawn mower, a container of motor oil, or a bottle of Vitamin C no matter when you buy them, but not on a pack of ball-point pens, an emergency generator, or an AR-15 if you buy them between Date X and Date Y, has the same effect.

The politicians grandstanding on these holiday proposals are hoping you’ll notice, and credit them for, the small tax breaks on a few things at particular times — and not think to ask why everything else is taxed all the time. They’re trying to buy your vote, but they don’t want to pay full price for it.

And it should come as no surprise that the biggest supporters of tax holidays on Product X (and likely the biggest campaign contributors to politicians proposing those holidays) are the makers and sellers of Product X.

If the legislators proposing these tax holidays were serious about cutting taxes, they’d propose reducing tax rates on everything, all the time, not on a few things now and then. That would be good for all taxpayers, including lower-income citizens who don’t have as much discretionary income to waste on the politically favored item of the week.

Florida’s general state sales tax rate is 6%. Instead of reducing it to 0% for laptops this week and storm windows next week and ammunition the week after that, I’d like to see my state’s holiday-happy politicians propose cutting the general rate to 5% on everything, year-round.

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 president Donald Trump “Has a Problem as the Coronavirus Threatens the US,” assert the authors of a New York Times analysis: “His Credibility.”

In the tagline and elsewhere in the article, the authors imply that the spread of COVID-19, aka “the coronavirus,” constitutes a “public health crisis” and a “national emergency” which Trump’s “history of issuing false claims” handicaps him in selling plans to address.

If they’re right about Trump’s credibility, they’re pointing to a feature, not a bug. The last thing we need is an impetuous political response to COVID-19.

The coronavirus is neither a national emergency nor a public health crisis in the US. Absent heavy-handed government involvement it’s unlikely to become either.

What is COVID-19?

It’s a regional epidemic in China, with a fairly low — and continuously falling as more and more asymptomatic cases are discovered — mortality rate even there.

It’s likely to be far less deadly in the US, which has better air quality than, and about 1/5th the percentage of smokers as, China. Like other “common cold” type viruses, it’s more likely to kill those with compromised lungs and/or immune systems.

Yes, COVID-19 is coming to America. In fact, it’s already here, and it’s going to spread.

It will spread whether Trump appoints vice-president Mike Pence to stop it or not.

It will spread whether federal government and state governments impose draconian but ineffectual measures like travel restrictions and large-scale quarantines or not.

Political grandstanding over the coronavirus and “emergency measures” versus the coronavirus will almost certainly kill more people — in the US and abroad — than the coronavirus itself.

Every “emergency measure” imposes costs in the form of drag on economic activity.

We’ve already seen what happens to the stock market when business gets nervous about the Chinese nodes in its supply chains.

Travel and trade restrictions mean higher prices and lost jobs, both of which discourage Americans from seeing doctors when they get sick.

Treating COVID-19 as a genuine American public health emergency instead of as an understandable but unjustified panic means  medical resources get mal-invested in fighting COVID-19 instead of the other real, existing health problems they’re needed to fight.

Higher prices, lost jobs, and medical mal-investment are a recipe for dead Americans.

You probably won’t get the coronavirus. If you do get it, it probably won’t kill you. But politicians and bureaucrats trafficking in panic just might succeed where it fails.

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.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

According to selected members of the “US intelligence community” (“selected” for their loyalty to, and willingness to promote the line of, the Democratic Party establishment) Vladimir Putin and the Russian government just love them some Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Can’t get enough of ’em. If November is a Trump/Sanders shoot-out, the Kremlin wins either way.

Yes, it’s silly. It might even be funny if so many people didn’t take it so seriously and if it wasn’t so on the nose in aping Joe McCarthy’s Red Scare tactics.

Here’s why it’s silly: Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are also much beloved by those meddling kids (yes, I grew up watching Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!).

No, not the Russians. The voters.

Like K-pop and post-Roseanne The Conners, I find the appeal of the two northeastern authoritarian septuagenarians inexplicable, but it’s very real.

Despite Herculean efforts by the Democratic National Committee to put anyone but Bernie over the top for its presidential nomination, by hook or crook, he’s winning primaries and caucuses and leading in the national polls.

In states where anyone’s even allowed to challenge Trump, he’s pulling 85-95% support from Republican voters.

The Republican establishment went through an agonizing process in 2016, eventually coming to terms with having its party taken over and remade. By Trump, yes, but more importantly by Trump’s voters.

The Democratic National Committee’s “success” in 2016 was also a double failure: It managed to rig the presidential primary contest to ensure that its preferred candidate won the nomination, but it couldn’t carry the general election and couldn’t bring itself to accept responsibility for that. It was easier to blame !THEM RUSSIANS! for Hillary Clinton’s failure than to admit that Democratic voters weren’t enthusiastic about her and didn’t turn out for her in the needed numbers.

And the DNC still hasn’t read the memo. Having abjectly failed to make Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, or Elizabeth Warren palatable to pluralities, it’s still trying to whip those meddling voters into line behind Pete Buttigieg or Amy Klobuchar instead of accepting Bernie as their choice. Now, in desperation, it’s playing the “Russian meddling” card again.

Is there foreign meddling in American elections? Presumably so, and by several governments, just like there’s American government meddling in foreign elections. The only countries which don’t experience foreign meddling in their elections are countries which don’t hold real elections.

But in the case of US elections, the Russian meddling doesn’t even rise to the level of background noise, let alone to the level of excuse for the losing candidate’s defeat.

Interested in meddling? OK, let’s talk about meddling.

Over the last 130 years or so, the two “major” parties have conspired to limit voters’ choices with “ballot access” laws, exclusory beauty pageants disguised as “debates,” etc., such that both internal dissidents and “third party” candidates are severely handicapped from the start and seldom win “major” party primaries or break into double digits in November.

That’s meddling for real. But suddenly it isn’t working reliably anymore. Poetic justice, perhaps?

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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