US President Joe Biden rolled out his 2022 federal budget request on May 28, surprising no one with his proposals for lavish expenditures on education, healthcare, and infrastructure, or with his promise that only the rich will be soaked to pay for it all (the $1.8 trillion projected deficit will be borrowed in your name, but you’re not supposed to notice).

Given that the US is drawing down its 20-year war in Afghanistan, one might expect some kind of peace dividend on the mis-named “defense” line of the proposal, but no such luck.

Biden proposes an increase of “only” 1.7%, to $715 billion, with “only” eight new warships instead of the 12 called for in the Navy’s shipbuilding plan. Biden also wants to “invest” in 85 more F-35 Lightning combat aircraft, one of the US “defense” industry’s favorite white elephants.

“Wholly inadequate!” complain US Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) and US Representative Mike Rogers  (R-AL), ranking members on their respective houses’ Armed Services Committees.

US Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) calls the general budget proposal “insanely expensive,” but also gripes that “over time it will result in a weakened Department of Defense.”

In mid-May, anticipating the possibility that Biden might not offer to forklift much larger pallets of new cash into “defense” contractors’ getaway trucks, US Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) declared that failing to increase US military spending by 3-5%, above and beyond inflation, would be a “red line” for Republicans.

Let’s be clear on one thing: The US “defense” budget has little to do with defense. If it was really about defense, it could be cut by 90% and still be bloated.

The US “defense” budget is about two things: Redistributing wealth from your wallet to the bank accounts of “defense” contractors, and trying unsuccessfully to rule the world.

On the former front, if it was really  about defense, US Coast Guard ships would be patrolling the US coast, not the Iranian coast, and a much smaller force of US military personnel would have spent the last 20 years in places like Texas and Vermont rather than in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Syria, etc.

On the latter front, it’s no coincidence that, as Reuters reports, “Senators and governors have come out to support the[F-35] which has a huge industrial base.” That is, a base of generous campaign contributors who also create artificial “jobs” in the Senators’ and governors’ states, building something for which there’s no real market demand but which you can be forced to buy whether you want it or not.

“All the armies of Europe and Asia,” Abraham Lincoln said in 1838, “could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years.” He was right then, and even with an actual defense budget one tenth the current size of the military budget, he’d be right today.

The US “defense” budget is a transparent scam.  It’s disappointing, but not especially surprising, that Joe Biden is an only slightly less aggressive con artist than his Republican counterparts.

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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“Unity begins with the truth,” US Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) tweeted on January 13, arguing in favor of the impeachment of then-President Donald Trump,  “and the truth demands accountability.”

Senator Warren just loves her some “accountability.” In 2018, she proposed the “Accountable Capitalism Act.” In 2019, the “Corporate Executive Accountability Act.” In 2020, according to Forbes, she demanded “Accountability From 181 CEOs.” A Google search on her name and the word “accountability” returns 668,000 results.

The relevant question when Senator Warren brings up “accountability” is, of course, “accountability to whom?”

And the feeling one gets, regardless of her claims to be acting on behalf of workers, consumers, or corporate shareholders, is that it’s really all about accountability to … drum roll please … US Senator Elizabeth Warren.

Warren’s not the only politician with such an attitude, of course. She’s just more loudly transparent about it than most, which is why I picked her to pick on here.

Her mask (no, not the COVID-19 mask, the other one) briefly came off on March 25 when she told Amazon that she’s “fight[ing] to break up Big Tech so you’re not powerful enough to heckle senators with snotty tweets.”

She means to rule. She thinks she’s ENTITLED to rule. And the peasants (a group she places even Jeff Bezos, at the moment the second wealthiest man in the world, in!)? Our job is to keep our smart-aleck mouths shut and do as we’re told.

So, to whom is Senator Warren  herself accountable?

The easy answer is “the voters of Massachusetts.” But the US has a de facto “Senator for Life” system under which incumbents get re-elected more than 90% of the time. Not so much because their voters love them, as because incumbents rake in a lot of money to hold onto their seats for as long as they like, while challengers tend to struggle.

Perhaps she’s accountable to her campaign contributors? But owners or employees of the “Big Tech” firms she says she wants to “break up” rank high on that list (Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft, AT&T, and, yes, Amazon are all in the top 20). Are they trying to buy her off, or maybe change her mind? Either way, it doesn’t seem to be working.

As best I can tell, the only person US Senator Elizabeth Warren considers herself accountable to is US Senator Elizabeth Warren.

And on that count, US Senator Elizabeth Warren is par for the course as American politicians go.

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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In 2018, telling us that “trade wars are good, and easy to win,” then-US-president Donald Trump imposed 15-25% tariffs (versus the previous rate of 10% and the average US tariff of 1.6%) on various Chinese goods, ranging from “dental cements and other dental fillings” to “Trout, fresh or chilled, excluding fillets, other meat portions, livers and roes.”

China wasn’t the only target.  Trump also imposed a 20% tariff on Canadian lumber.

Turns out (as if we didn’t already know from previous experiences) that trade wars are bad and nearly impossible to “win,” if “winning” means making the citizens of the country imposing tariffs more prosperous.

Sure, SOME people — the owners of, and some of the workers in, the industries Trump claimed to be “protecting” — came out ahead. But everyone else lost.

Trump’s tariffs aren’t the only reasons that the stuff you buy (especially stuff made of steel or wood) is more expensive now than in 2018. But they’re among those reasons.

Four months into his presidency, Joe Biden seems disinclined to roll Trump’s tariffs back and bring these ruinous trade wars to an end.

Why? Because in one key area, Trump and Biden were competing for the same “voter base.” That area is the Rust Belt, and the base is industrial labor. Trump won the 2016 election on the back of what we used to call “Reagan Democrats.” Like Reagan, Trump carried those states by promising to bring jobs “back” from abroad. And this has always been part of Biden’s pitch as well, a pitch he’s used to bring organized labor in on his side in every campaign for office he’s ever run.

Yes, Trump and Biden both pretend that it’s  “China,” not you, paying those tariffs.

But according to Moody’s Investors Service, more than 90% of the tariffs on “China” are actually absorbed by US importers of Chinese goods in the form of higher prices. And guess who those importers are passing the price increases onto?

You, that’s who.

Every extra penny you shell out for every good you buy in which tariffs are involved is essentially a campaign contribution to whichever politician keeps (or promises to keep) those tariffs in place. That includes domestically produced goods whose makers can jack up their prices because tariffs raised their foreign competitors’ costs.

Tariffs are the domestic equivalent of foreign economic sanctions, which in turn are the economic equivalent of war. No, not war on “China.” War on you.

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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