On August 23, Democratic primary voters in Florida picked their champion for the November attempt to unseat incumbent Republican governor Ron DeSantis.

In fairness, those voters weren’t offered much of a choice. The two “had a realistic chance of winning” candidates were Nikki Fried and Charlie Crist.

Fried, a former lobbyist, spent her entire term as the state’s only statewide elected official (agriculture commissioner) issuing “oh no you didn’t” press releases every time DeSantis so much as yawned, and pulling stupid tricks like adding her photo to the inspection stickers on every Florida gas pump as publicly funded campaign ads (the legislature nixed that one in short order).

You’d  have to look pretty hard to find a candidate less likely to lead a successful anti-DeSantis revolution. Unless, of course, Charlie Crist happened to get interested. Which he did, decisively defeating Fried for the ballot line.

Crist  is the mirror-like spitting image of Ron DeSantis: They’re both swamp creatures, political careerists, tax parasites who’ve spent their entire adult lives either on, or trying to get on, government payrolls.

Crist has been a state senator, state education commissioner, state attorney general, governor, and US Representative. He’s been continuously in office, running for office, or preparing to run for office since 1986. His party affiliation record is sort of “reverse Donald Trump.” Over the last decade, he’s gone from Republican to “independent” to Democrat. Whose dog is he? Whomever’s will hunt with him in his latest crusade to get paid for running your life.

DeSantis’s resume is shorter but strikingly similar. He went from government lawyer — first in the US Navy, representing/advising the government’s Guantanamo Bay torturers, then as an assistant US attorney — to US Representative, to jumping on the Trump train and getting himself elected governor by a razor-thin margin of less than 1/2 of 1% in 2018. Since which time he’s split his work days between pouring culture war fertilizer on his presidential ambitions and trying to make sure that anyone who might vote against his re-election this November can’t vote at all.

Neither of these life-long grifters deserves another four years of welfare checks, but one of them will almost certainly win this November’s episode of Wheel of Voter Misfortune (spoiler: It will probably be DeSantis, who’s at least good at motivating his “base,” while Crist enthuses only … well, no one).

In 2016, Trump re-popularized the slogan “drain the swamp,” which has been around forever but which he probably cribbed from Pat Buchanan, who beat him in his first presidential campaign (the Reform Party’s 2000 nomination contest).

DeSantis and Crist ARE the swamp. They may not represent EVERYTHING  wrong with American politics, but between them they represent most of those things. They’re twin poster boys for term limits, with the preferred number being “zero.”

I won’t attempt to advise Florida voters on their third party and independent options, but they should know that a vote for Ron DeSantis is a vote for Charlie Crist, and a vote for Charlie Crist is a vote for Ron DeSantis.

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

On August 24, the Biden administration finally announced what pretty much everyone (including me) had been predicting for months:  A new round of “student loan forgiveness” and an extension to the COVID-19-justified “payment pause.”

Quick details of the current plan: More than 40 million borrowers will receive some relief. About 20 million will have their debt completely forgiven. Individuals who earn less than $125,000 per year (or couples earning up to $250,000) will have up to $10,000 taken off their tabs. Lower-income individuals who qualified for Pell Grants are eligible for double that amount.

While the details are new, the timing was never much in doubt, because helping out existing student borrowers is the effect, not the intent, of the plan. The intent is to motivate 40 million voters (and their parents, spouses, and children) to vote for Democrats less than three months from now in the midterm congressional elections.

Similarly, the intent behind Republican howling over the measure is to motivate everyone who feels ripped off because they didn’t borrow money for college, or paid that debt off without such assistance, but who will be taxed to cover the check for Biden’s generosity, to vote Republican.

My guess is that the Democrats have the upper hand here: The beneficiaries are going to be very happy;  taxpayers in general are barely going to notice in the long term, and probably not get nearly as up in arms as the GOP hopes they will in the short term.

The total amount involved (in this round, anyway) comes to “only” $329.1 billion over ten years according to the Penn Wharton Budget Model.

Yes, that sounds like a lot of money, and it is.

On the other hand, it’s less than half (again, spread over ten years) as much as each of us gets ripped off for every year, year in and year out, for a supposed “national defense” that consists largely of writing welfare checks to Raytheon, Boeing, and friends, and workfare checks to kids who go into uniform instead off to college.

Say what you will about some of the more seemingly useless courses of study: At least your average “gender studies” student probably isn’t torturing prisoners at Guantanamo Bay or murdering eight-year-old American girls in Yemen. So there’s that, anyway.

As someone whose tiny student debt was paid off long ago (I dropped out midway through my first semester of college and have paid cash for the credit hours I’ve slowly accrued since), the idea neither enthuses nor upsets me.

On the other hand, this “forgiveness” does nothing to address the underlying problems with the high costs of higher education.  It’s just a Democratic Party vote-buying scheme that Republicans are hoping to use as a BOGO for their own base.

If our political class actually wanted to address the real problems, they’d get government out of the student lending business, and allow student debt to be discharged in bankruptcy on the same terms as other debt.

Unfortunately, solving problems is the opposite of what politics is about.

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 a recent National Institutes of Health survey, United Press International reports, “use of marijuana and hallucinogens among young adults in the United States reached an all-time high in 2021.”

According to the survey, 43% of young adults admitted to having used cannabis in the past year, with 8% saying they’ve tried LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, or other “hallucinogens.”

That, believe it or not, is good news.  Both of these “drug” categories have a history of use as long as the history of humanity, with known medical and mental benefits, few negative side effects, and virtually no correlation to violent behaviors.

None of these items should have ever been illegal to use, possess, sell, or grow/manufacture in the first place, and increasing familiarity with them continues to feed  growing opposition to the  “war on drugs.”

They’re all, in three words, “safer than alcohol.”

Which, the same survey says, remains the most popular “drug,” with binge drinking rebounding from a 2020 low and “high-intensity” drinking steadily increasing.

That’s the bad news.

If I knew one of my children (all now thankfully and safely out of their teens) was going out to “party,” and that recreational substances would be involved, I’d much rather they got into a bag of weed or some mushroom caps than into a case of beer or a fifth of bourbon. There’s just less potential for senseless brawls, sexual assault, or driving while impaired.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve personally got nothing against alcohol, and don’t think it should be illegal. I use it, although these days I drink maybe a six-pack of beer and a few ounces of whiskey a year; it used to be … well, quite a bit more.

Here’s the thing:

People have both self-medicated and recreationally dosed themselves with various things since there have been humans.

They’ll keep doing so, even if politicians get together and decree that they mustn’t.

The choice we face is not between a society of junkies and a “drug-free America.” History has taught us that neither of those things is going to happen.

The choice is between a society where we’re free to choose what we eat, drink, smoke, or otherwise ingest — and are responsible for what follows — or a society where eating, drinking, smoking, or otherwise ingesting the “wrong” substance may mean prison whether we harmed anyone else or not.

We’re moving in the former direction. And should continue to do so.

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