Monthly Archives: April 2021

Op-Eds

Congressional Democrats to Biden: Pour Some SALT on That Infrastructure

Leave a comment

As the debate over President Joe Biden’s infrastructure proposals heats up, Roll Call reports that “[a] new caucus pressing for repeal of the $10,000 limitation on state and local tax deductions boasts the support of more than one-third of Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee.”

The SALT cap, implemented when Donald Trump was president and the GOP still held congressional majorities, is a “man bites dog” issue that places Democrats and Republicans opposite their usual supposed sides.

Simply put, the SALT deduction allows you to deduct state and local taxes from your “gross adjusted” income for federal tax purposes. The SALT cap limits those deductions to $10,000 per year.

Republicans usually posture as advocates of low taxes, especially on the upper end of the income scale, reasoning from the Reagan-era “supply side” (or what Democrats sardonically call “trickle-down”) premise that doing so encourages investment and creates “a rising tide that lifts all boats.”

Democrats usually advocate making wealthier Americans pick up “their fair share” of government’s tab, a “fair share”  they tend to define as bigger, both in raw numbers and as income percentages, for the wealthier  (Republicans sardonically call it “soaking the rich”).

When it comes to the SALT cap, though, the parties  (mostly — New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a notable exception to the rule) switch sides, and some are willing to hold the infrastructure deal hostage over it.

Why? Because an unlimited SALT deduction means that state governments get a sort of free ride on their own tax rates. A wealthy New Yorker or Californian who pays, say, $50,000 in state taxes can knock that $50,000 off of her federal taxable income.

The $10,000 SALT cap might encourage that wealthy New Yorker or Californian to consider moving out of New York or California, to a state with lower taxes (Florida or Texas, for example) and taking her prospective state tax payments with her.

It’s no accident that the two high-tax states I mention are “blue” Democratic states and the two low-tax states  are “red” Republican states. The two parties’ tax philosophies are, generally speaking, mirrored at the state level.

The ability to move between states is way of “pricing” tax policy. Too high, people move out. Low enough, people move in. The SALT cap encourages people and their wealth to move from “blue” states to “red” states.

It’s shouldn’t surprise anyone that in this case, the Republican line becomes “make them pay their fair share!” while the Democratic line becomes “not like THAT!”

I don’t like taxes. You probably don’t either.  But if we’re going to have them, federal tax policy shouldn’t be manipulated to artificially benefit tax-happy state governments. The SALT deduction shouldn’t be capped. It should be eliminated.

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

Op-Eds

Joe Biden Reaffirms Washington’s Message to the World: Never, Ever Trust Us

1 Comment
3rd Battalion, 3rd Marines - Afghanistan
3rd Battalion, 3rd Marines — Afghanistan. Photo by Corporal James L. Yarboro, USMC. Public Domain.

In February 2020, US President Donald Trump announced a peace deal with the Taliban, giving US forces 15 months to get out of Afghanistan. Nearly a year later, with  the withdrawal nearly complete and only 2,500 US armed forces members remaining on Afghan soil, incoming President Joe Biden took the oath of inauguration and instantly began complaining that the May 1 deadline would be “hard to meet.”

The claim is silly on its face. The US military is great at moving people. Eight months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, US Marines waded ashore at Guadalcanal. Five months after Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, the US had moved 697,000 troops to the theater of operations for what became Operation Desert Storm. For any competent commander, moving 2,500 troops from Point A to Point B is a weekend hobby project, not a major undertaking. All Biden had to do was give the order.

On February 13, the White House leaked a new date: September 11, 20th anniversary of the attacks that President George W. Bush cited as casus belli for what was supposed to be a short, sharp war to liquidate al Qaeda in Afghanistan, but quickly turned into a 20-year failed (and deadly) “nation-building” project.

Should we be surprised? Well, no. Biden is just following in the footsteps of his predecessors. Given the long, sorry record of US perfidy, the Taliban shouldn’t be surprised either.

“The United States acknowledge the lands reserved to the Oneida, Onondaga and Cayuga Nations,” reads Article II of the Treaty of Canandaigua, ratified by the US Senate in 1795. “[T]he United States will never claim the same nor disturb them.”

Between then and 1868, the United States continuously negotiated, then sooner or later violated, hundreds of treaties with the continent’s native tribes. By 1920, the extent of Oneida land “acknowledged” in the Treaty of Canandaigua had been reduced from six million acres to 32.

Abroad, the US government takes a similar tack, always treating other parties’ agreed obligations as non-negotiable and its own such obligations as optional.

The Non-Proliferation Treaty requires the US to work toward getting rid of its nuclear arsenal. Instead, recent administrations have gone in the other direction with a focus on “modernizing” that arsenal, while demanding that the Iranian regime go beyond its NPT obligations … then defaulting on its end of THAT deal, too.

As David A. Koplow of the Georgetown University Law Center points out, the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention required the US to destroy its chemical weapons stockpiles by 2012. At last check, the US Army promises to get that done … in 2023.

Also per Koplow, the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations requires governments to inform foreign arrestees of their right to communicate with their countries’ consuls and seek assistance. The US demands that of other governments when Americans are arrested abroad, and routinely “forgets” its own such duty when foreigners are arrested in the US.

At this point, no one should be surprised when the US government lies. It would be far more surprising if Joe Biden told the truth for once.

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

Op-Eds

Joe Biden’s Latest “Gun Violence” Fairy Tale

1 Comment
Gun photo from RGBStock
Free photo from RGBStock

A White House “fact sheet” tells us that “the President is committed to taking action to reduce all forms of gun violence.”

The “fact sheet” departs from the facts starting with its title, which characterizes gun violence as a “public health epidemic.” Gun violence is a set of volitional human behaviors, not an infectious disease spread by gun cooties and amenable to “public health” remedies.

The “fact sheet” announces six “initial actions,” none of which any sane person would expect to substantially impact gun violence.

Ineffectual initial action #1: “The Justice Department … will issue a proposed rule to help stop the proliferation of ‘ghost guns.'”

“Ghost guns” are homemade firearms. They’re not made in government-licensed facilities, nor do their makers generally report them to the government. While some are built from commercially sold kits, firearms are simple technology. You could probably build one from items lying around your house, even if you don’t have machine tools or a 3D printer. No matter how many rules DOJ proposes,  the vast majority of ghost guns will remain beyond its reach.

Ineffectual action #2: “The Justice Department … will issue a proposed rule to make clear when a device marketed as a stabilizing brace effectively turns a pistol into a short-barreled rifle subject to the requirements of the National Firearms Act.”

That’s even dumber than the “ghost gun” rule. Stabilizing braces are even easier to build at home than guns. And if anyone paid attention to a rule against them, that rule would only magnify the carnage of mass shootings as violent criminals sprayed more bullets, less accurately, into their targeted areas.

Now we move from merely ineffectual to idiotically counter-productive with action #3: ‘The Justice Department … will publish model ‘red flag’ legislation for states.”

“Red flag” laws allow police to seize guns from people who haven’t been accused, let alone convicted, of crimes on the claim that they “present a danger to themselves or others.” When a bunch of gun-waving cops show up unexpectedly to confiscate someone’s firearms, that someone sometimes DOES start presenting a danger to themselves or others, when he or she hadn’t before. And if he or she doesn’t respond that way, it’s evidence that the order was unnecessary in the first place.

In addition to likely being 99% ineffectual and counterproductive, the first three “initial actions” are also 100% unconstitutional.

Initial actions number 4 and 5 are just bureaucratic showboating to justify throwing taxpayer money in a hole and setting it on fire: “The Administration is investing in evidence-based community violence interventions” and “[t]he Justice Department will issue an annual report on firearms trafficking.”

Action #6 — the appointment of former Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives thug (and Waco massacre revisionist) David Chipman to head that agency — is probably a subject for a whole column of its own. It might actually be consequential.

The first five “initial actions” are a mix of pro-gun-violence idiocy and public relations fluff that the White House should be embarrassed for even trying to put over on the public as non-fiction.

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