According to an Agence France-Presse “fact check,” social media posts slamming Kamala Harris’s plan to tax “unrealized” capital gains are “mostly false” — not because they lie about the fundamental premise, but because the new tax would only hit “households with a net worth of at least $100 million, or an estimated 0.01 percent of taxpayers.”

The problems with Harris’s idea are multiple and fundamental, but let’s look at the “slippery slope” problem first.

In 1913, Congress passed the first modern federal income tax. It ranged from a whopping 1% on incomes exceeding $3,000  (about $95,000 per year in 2024 dollars), to as much as 7% on incomes of more than $500,000 (about $15 million today).

Nothing to worry about here, see? The upper middle class takes a tiny hit, the truly wealthy just a little more, no biggie!

Within decades, the income floors had fallen to capture most Americans, the rates had multiplied several times, and regular Americans started seeing taxes deducted directly from their weekly paychecks instead of just settling up with Uncle Sam once a year.

Today, you pay a minimum  of 10% — more than half again the rate once reserved for the “ultra-wealthy” —  and as much as 37%, tax on every dollar you earn beyond the $14,600 ($500 in 1913 dollars)  “standard deduction.”

Given that history, is it plausible to expect a tax on “unrealized capital gains” to forever exclude the prospective sale price of your home, the value of stock shares in your 401k, etc.?

No, it’s not plausible.

Nor is it rational to assume that because the prospective price of that home or the value of those stocks is higher today than when first purchased, it will remain so.

The only way to find out what something is really worth is to sell it — to “realize” the gain or loss. Prices change all the time. Once “blue chip” companies fall into bankruptcy. Once high-priced neighborhoods go out of fashion or fall into general disrepair.

People MAKE money in the stock and real estate markets, but they also LOSE money in those markets. Will they get tax refunds on the “unrealized” gains that they never “realize?” If so, when? And how expensive and intrusive will the bureaucracy required to sort all that out become?

The whole idea is, well, weird —  stupid and evil in pretty much every respect.

But no more stupid or evil than taxation as such.

Taxation is a continuing and coercive demand that you pay for “services” you may neither need or want, and may even actually oppose the existence of. It’s getting continuously mugged, from sales tax on the first package of gum you buy with your childhood allowance, to income and other taxes, right up until the day you die (and possibly beyond).

Unfortunately, the muggers also owe interest on the money they’ve borrowed, offering your future earnings as collateral. They’re getting desperate for cash, and your “unrealized capital gains” are the latest set of couch cushions they propose to hunt for change in.

It won’t “work,” but you’ll end up feeling the pain anyway.

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

When Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. dropped out of the US presidential race and endorsed the Republican nominee, former president Donald Trump, on August 23, his first reward was a promise: If elected, Axios reports, Trump say he will “establish an independent presidential commission on assassination attempts” and “task the commission with releasing all of the remaining documents pertaining to the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy.”

I’m skeptical, and I’m not alone.

The Future of Freedom Foundation’s Jacob G. Hornberger — author of several informative books on the assassination — notes that Trump made the same promise in 2016, then reneged on that promise.

Hornberger also asserts — with good reason, in my opinion — that even if “smoking gun” documentation contradicting the “Lee Harvey Oswald as lone assassin” narrative ever existed, “there is no chance whatsoever that the CIA would have turned over such a record to the Assassination Records Review Board or the National Archives instead of simply destroying it. ”

A third argument against the likelihood that we’ll get more information:

Weasel-word “tasking” a government agency, commission, or board with this or that deliverable is the go-to method by which a politician accomplishes nothing while claiming he kept a promise.

Trump himself is a great example: One of his promises in 2016 was to cut regulation by requiring federal agencies to eliminate two regulations for each new one they created.

But when Trump issued his vaunted executive order to that effect, it wasn’t really to that effect. It merely required the agencies to “identify” two regulations “for” repeal, not actually repeal them.

Results?

As of three days before Trump’s inauguration, according to QuantGov’s Regulation Tracker, the Federal Register included 1,079,651 regulations. The number of federal regulations then increased, not dropping below the original number again for nearly two years, then began increasing again, totaling 1,089,742 on the day Trump left office.

So:

Trump’s already proven he can’t be trusted to keep promises relating to records concerning the assassination of JFK.

Even if Trump claimed he was “keeping” that promise, his way of “keeping” it would most likely involve fobbing off responsibility on a commission with enough wiggle room in its mandate to avoid real disclosure.

And even if the commission released every last relevant document in the government’s possession, it’s a safe bet that any documents contradicting the “lone gunman” narrative in any substantive or provable way were shredded, then burned, then buried at sea decades ago.

The official story, as promulgated by the Warren Commission in 1964, hasn’t aged well. As of last year, per Gallup, 65% of Americans believe the assassination was carried out by conspirators, not by Oswald alone.

They’re probably right — but unfortunately, we’ll probably never know exactly what happened in Dallas that day.

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 April 19, 2023, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. launched his long-shot presidential bid as a Democrat.

On October 9, 2023, he declared himself an “independent” and began courting (and in some states, creating) “third parties” for their nominations. He received 19 votes for the Libertarian Party’s nomination at its 2024 national convention over Labor Day weekend.

Three months later, on August 23, he “suspended” his campaign and called for a “unity party” with the Republican candidate, former president Donald Trump.

I didn’t see  that last part coming, but color me un-surprised that his campaign struggled, grasped at various life preservers,  and finally  drowned.

All Kennedy ever really had going for him was his family’s name. He knew that was his biggest asset — he even ran a Super Bowl commercial reprising his uncle’s 1960 television advertisements — but nostalgia can only take one so far, especially when the family in question comes out hard against you.

Independent and third party presidential campaigns generally enjoy success (relatively speaking) in proportion to one or two factors.

The first, the one Kennedy leaned on, is identity.

Theodore Roosevelt didn’t knock down 27.4% of the vote in 1912 because of his Progressive, AKA Bull Moose, party’s platform. He did so well because everyone knew Theodore Roosevelt was and many  remembered his previous terms fondly.

It was Ross Perot’s personal legend — up-by-his-bootstraps billionaire businessman who flew Christmas gifts into Hanoi for America POWs and orchestrated the rescue of his company’s employees from post-revolution Iran — more so than his hammering on the national debt and opposition to NAFTA — that drove his vote totals of 18.91% in 1992 and 8.4% in 1996.

The Kennedy name was a big deal … once upon a time. But the US median age is 38.9 years. Most people alive today weren’t alive when Ted Kennedy unsuccessfully sought the Democratic nomination in 1980, let alone when RFK Jr.’s father and uncle were assassinated in, respectively, 1968 and 1963. Young people know the name, but they don’t feel the vibe.

The second factor is the issues. Most third party campaigns are either “single issue” or more generally “ideological.” They’re about the candidates’ platforms and policy positions. When voters go for a Libertarian, Green, or Constitution Party candidate, it’s because they care deeply about an issue or set of issues that the “major” parties either get “wrong” or ignore completely.

Kennedy’s policy suite was a dog’s breakfast of contradictions (anti-war on Ukraine, “pro-Israel” on Gaza), flip-flops (“pro-choice” early in the race then supporting a federal ban at the 2023 Iowa State Fair; calling for  prosecution of “climate deniers” back when then supporting free speech as a candidate),  and too-niche obsessions (he’s more generally “anti-vaccine” than the significant voter bloc outraged by COVID-19 mandates).

As Stewart Lawrence puts it at CounterPunch, he’s “a man with no enduring allegiance to an ideology, a party or even a platform who is willing to sell his campaign and his support to the highest bidder — in exchange for his own personal and political advancement.”

He saw, and seized, his opportunity to sell out.

Supporters who thought he was the “real deal” got conned.

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