“In Florida,” former and possibly future US president Donald Trump writes on Truth Social, “like so many other States that have already given their approval, personal amounts of marijuana will be legalized for adults with Amendment 3. Whether people like it or not, this will happen through the approval of the Voters, so it should be done correctly.”

I signed a petition to put Amendment 3 on the ballot — in fact, I’ve been signing similar petitions on the subject for years — and intend to vote for it in November. I expect it to pass. I hope it passes.  I’m thankful to Trump for kinda sorta endorsing it.  But that kinda sorta endorsement really highlights two aspects of the issue for me.

The first aspect is Trump’s call for it to be done “correctly,” by which he means “prohibit the use of it in public spaces, so we do not smell marijuana everywhere we go.”

I suppose it’s possible that there’s something special about Palm Beach. I’ve never been there. I live near Gainesville, Florida, and when in town I already smell marijuana everywhere I go.

I’ve also sampled the scents of Tallahassee, Jacksonville, St. Augustine, Orlando, Tampa, and numerous smaller Florida urbs. In Florida, if you exit your personal vehicle in any area boasting a population density greater than Greenland’s, you’re likely to smell cannabis.

Which leads me to the second interesting aspect of Amendment 3:

It’s nice, but not really necessary. Floridians who want to use weed already use weed. They use weed in private. They use weed in public. They’ll continue to do so. They don’t need your approval or your permission.

Would it be NICE to just have the stuff fully legal, at least to the extent that those who use it don’t find themselves at (minimal, but real) risk of arrest for personal possession? Yes, it would.

Would the failure of Amendment 3 reduce marijuana use in Florida? No, it wouldn’t.

This shouldn’t surprise you. Marijuana is informally referred to as “weed” for a reason: It grows pretty much everywhere in the wild. It isn’t difficult to grow at home, either. Human beings have used it and valued it both medically and recreationally for as long human beings have existed.

State and federal governments have spent more than a century trying to eliminate Americans’ use of cannabis. More — lots more — Americans use it now than before the war on weed began. They’ll continue to do so. Period.

Whether you use the stuff or not, legalizing it makes your life better in many ways — for example, you don’t have to pay for as many cops or as many prison cells.

Don’t like the smell? Too bad. Get used to it.

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 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