On June 16, US president Joe Biden and Russian president Vladimir Putin issued a Joint Statement on Strategic Stability, in which they “reaffirm the principle that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought” and “seek to lay the groundwork for future arms control and risk reduction measures.”

With the extension of the New START treaty and joint statements like that, it might seem that things aren’t looking too terribly bad with respect to reducing the threat of nuclear war. But talk and action are two very different things. Let’s roll back the calendar to the day before the rose-colored glasses went on.

“Despite calls from some Democrats and arms control advocates to slash spending on strategic forces,” National Defense magazine reported on June 15, “the Biden administration appears committed to forging ahead with previous administrations’ nuclear modernization programs.”

The Congressional Budget Office expects the US government to spend $634 billion on operating and “modernizing” its nuclear arsenal over the next ten years, and the Biden administration has requested $43.2 billion for such activities in its budget proposal for next year.

That doesn’t sound much like “groundwork for future arms control and risk reduction measures” to me.

And what good are future arms control measures when the parties obviously haven’t bothered to fulfill their obligations under past such measures?

Per the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, both the US and Russian regimes have been committed for more than 50 years “to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament.”

But according to the Federation of American Scientists’ “Status of World Nuclear Forces” report, Russia and the US still maintain arsenals of, respectively, 6,257 and 5,550 nuclear warheads.

And, FAS says, “[t]he pace of reduction has slowed significantly compared with the 1990s and appears to continue only because of dismantlement of retired weapons; the military stockpiles (operational nuclear weapons) are increasing again.”

How many warheads constitute a “nuclear deterrent,” assuming such a thing is truly needed until we are clearly approaching the zero nuke mark?

Well, the US only has nine cities with populations in excess of one million. Russia only has 15. The ability to wipe out all those population centers, especially from platforms like submarines that aren’t likely to be taken out in a surprise first strike, seems like a heck of a deterrent to starting a nuclear fight (and an implicit terrorist threat, but one we’re already living with and then some).

Even adding in key military bases as targets, how could more than, say, 50 warheads each (less than one percent of current arsenals) be justified as a “deterrent?”

And what’s the holdup on getting down to that number?

No additional agreements are necessary. Either side can do it unilaterally, without agreement from the other, and  the other side would be left just wasting money on expensive, dangerous, and effectively useless  junk.

It’s time to grow up and end this silly nuclear penis size contest.

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

Next week, I’m going to travel across a bunch of imaginary lines drawn on the ground by politicians.

Those lines are called “borders,” and in the case of my upcoming trip they separate areas known to most as Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, and New Hampshire.

There are also a bunch of other borders, too numerous to mention, within THOSE borders, separating places called “counties,” “cities,” etc.

I don’t expect to have any problem crossing all those borders. You probably don’t have any problem crossing them either. You may cross two or three borders on your way to work, or when you pop out to grab dinner and watch a movie. Chances are you won’t be pulled over at any checkpoints to have your “papers” checked when you cross from Utah into Idaho, or from Cook County into Chicago, to make sure you have permission to cross the imaginary lines.

On my own trip, I could decide to stop traveling, rent an apartment, hit the “help wanted” ads for a job, etc. and nobody would so much as raise an eyebrow (well, nobody but my wife, anyway).

If I suddenly decide to put down roots  in Burlington or Lancaster, I won’t be put into shackles and deported to Gainesville. I’ll  just be treated as subject to the laws in Vermont or New Hampshire instead of Florida. No biggie.

But if I want to travel less than 50 miles between Burlington and Saint-Armand, or less than 60 miles between Lancaster and Dixville, or fly  to Acapulco or Reykjavik and back for a vacation, a bunch of cultists on both sides of some of the imaginary lines separating those places will start insisting that where I go and what I do is very much their business.

Why? Because they fervently believe that those imaginary lines imbue them with a special magical right to require that I get their permission to move, to stop, to live, to work, etc. And, unfortunately, these particular cultists employ large numbers of thugs to enforce their superstitions at gunpoint.

The next time you hear about a “border crisis,” I hope you’ll keep in mind that if there really is such a “crisis,” it is caused by those cultists and their obsession with controlling others, not by the ordinary, peaceful practice of free people traveling wherever they damn well please.

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

It’s a tantalizing headline from investigative journalism group ProPublica:  “The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax.”

The source material for the report is an alleged “vast cache of IRS information” which may have been illegally leaked. A spokesperson for the US Treasury says that angle has been referred to the FBI, federal prosecutors, and other investigative bodies. And the title was clearly crafted to get our outrage gears turning.

But digging into the details, the promised revelation is … well, kind of boring. How do the wealthiest Americans “avoid” income tax? By not having “income.”

Yes, really. Words mean things, and the IRS spills a lot of ink defining those things.

How much ink? As of 2017, according to PolitiFact, the Internal Revenue Code was 6,550 pages long —  not including (Politifact cites the Tax Foundation)  6.6 million words of additional IRS regulations and 60,000 pages of case law.

And, as it turns out, most of the most wealthy’s wealth isn’t “income” according to the IRS’s definitions.

I’ll use Jeff Bezos as the example, because everybody does, right?

You’ve probably seen the headlines after a big stock move: “Bezos’s wealth increases by $4 billion” and so forth.

The obvious way of visualizing this headline is that a truck full of $100 bills pulled up to Bezos’s house and a crew carted those bills to the room where Bezos likes to roll around in money a la Scrooge McDuck.

What really happened is that the prospective sale value of stock that Bezos owns went up. Until and unless he actually sells that stock, he hasn’t made a dime. If he does sell that stock for more than it was worth when he got it, he’ll get hit for capital gains taxes of up to 20% on the price difference. Which is nowhere near the top income tax rate of 37% … but Jeff Bezos didn’t write the tax code, did he?

As a libertarian, I’d prefer to do away with taxes altogether. If the Navy wants a new aircraft carrier, let it hold a bake sale, or maybe send the Marines out to knock on doors and sell subscriptions to Rolling Stone to raise the money.

But if we’re going to have taxes, it’s kind of silly to blame people who pay what the tax code says they have to pay, rather than more, just because the amount paid doesn’t seem like “enough.”

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