Thirty-five trillion.

Wow, that’s a really, really big number — big enough that it deserves my exploitation of it as the entire opening paragraph of this column.

OK, so add “dollars” after that really, really big number if you must, or put a dollar sign before it, as in “on July 26, the US national debt pass the $35 trillion mark.”

That feels like a real milestone — around $7 trillion more than last year’s Gross Domestic Product, which supposedly represents the value of all goods and services produced in the US  — but it didn’t generate nearly as much panicked media notice as I’d expected it to.

Maybe the American press is a bit distracted by the weirdest presidential campaign season in decades (and that’s saying something!).

Or maybe the national debt has just grown so large, and its growth accelerated to such speeds, that it’s become the usual and really only merits the “footnote and yawn” treatment these days.

I’m old enough to remember when American politicians engaged in vigorous public hand-wringing about their debt (all the while, of course, pretending it was YOUR debt), occasionally even tinkering with tiny spending cuts or not so tiny tax hikes to “do something” about it.

Those days are long gone. “If we don’t raise the debt ceiling and borrow more money, the world will end!” is the new “if we don’t stop spending more than we bring in, we’re screwed!” Perhaps that’s because the politicians kept spending more than they brought in until the screwing became inevitable.

Personally, I think they’ve taken an often misinterpreted quote from a long-dead economist to heart and turned it into their plan of action.

“The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs,” John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1923. “In the long run we are all dead.”

Keynes meant that as a call for vigorous short-term economic action on the part of government in times of crisis, as opposed to waiting for the ship to right itself over a longer time frame.

Today’s politicians treat it instead as permission to spend like drunken sailors on shore leave and hope they’re dead — or at least retired — before the bills come due and the ship goes down.

And, make no mistake, it WILL go down. The politicians will eventually default on their debt, either openly or with accounting tricks … and do their damnedest to stick you with most of the negative consequences.

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

In a July 29 Washington Post op-ed,  president Joe Biden lays out a three-part proposal for reforming the Supreme Court.  With Biden in full-blown “lame duck” status  (he’s no longer seeking re-election), it’s better read as a “think piece” than as a real policy proposal with any chance of adoption. But it’s still food for thought, so let’s think.

Biden’s proposal comes in three parts:

First, a constitutional amendment to “make it clear” (as if it wasn’t already) that there is no immunity for crimes a former president committed while in office.

No such amendment should be necessary, nor is any amendment likely to garner 2/3 support in both houses of Congress and ratification by 3/4 of state legislatures at this time, nor would it likely matter anyway even if ratified. After all, the Supreme Court’s majority simply ignored the text, meaning, and history of the US Constitution to get the magical immunity outcome it wanted for former president Donald Trump. Why would we expect the court to respect a new amendment when it won’t respect the existing law?

Second, term limits of 18 years for Supreme Court justices. Biden doesn’t mention that those term limits would likewise require a constitutional amendment, or that they wouldn’t solve the court’s “politicization” problem (his proposal would still retain presidential appointment and Senate confirmation of justices).

Third, a “binding code of ethics” for the court.  But again, absent a constitutional amendment creating some other process, the court (or Congress, via impeachment) would themselves remain the ultimate arbiters of whether that code was violated.  Neither the court nor Congress has taken action on (for example) justice Clarence Thomas’s flagrant acceptance of bribes under the current system. How would a new “code” fix that?

The three proposals all fail right at the starting point. They’re not going to enjoy adoption before Biden’s retirement next January, if ever.

So why not aim for the stars instead and propose REAL reforms that would be just as difficult to pass but that might solve the biggest problems — the partisan/political nature of how the court is chosen and the lifetime tenure that gifts the justices with impunity for poor or corrupt decision-making?

My proposal:

First, one-year terms for a Supreme Court composed of an odd number of randomly selected US citizens (the process is called “sortition”) who, after their names are drawn, demonstrate a standardized test IQ of greater than 100. No conscription — any citizen can refuse to serve. No presidential appointments allowed and no Senate confirmation needed.

Second, sequestration from the beginning to the end of each term. The justices live in a barracks facility. No phones. No email. Recreational television, but no news programs. A well-stocked law library, with classic novels for recreational reading, but no current events punditry allowed.

One year in total isolation with no sensory input other than the Constitution, the law, and the filings to affect rulings. Then a new court takes over.

About as likely to pass as Biden’s proposals, but at least worth the effort.

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

“Bad News for Universal Basic Income.” The “bad news,” per  Reason‘s Eric Boehm. is that a non-profit’s three-year, 1,000-person, $1,000-per-month trial of the idea “resulted in decreased productivity and earnings, and more leisure time.”

Is that really bad news? Well, it depends on who you are and what you want.

UBI advocates  like Andrew Yang  predict the idea would, in part, “enable all Americans to pay their bills, educate themselves, start businesses … relocate for work.”

Bad news indeed … on those metrics, anyway.

But Yang also predicts a UBI would let recipients “be more creative, stay healthy … spend time with their children, take care of loved ones …”

Call it a tie at most.

The education/productivity/work side of Yang’s equation seems like so much window dressing to soothe real economic concerns.

The real marketing sizzle lies in a utopian vision aimed at people who would — quite understandably — rather spend eight hours a day in front of the television set than on the service side of a fast food drive-thru window, and be willing to take a bit of a pay cut (probably offset by reduced costs of transportation, etc.) for it.

I’m opposed to “guaranteed income” schemes for a number of reasons, but those reasons don’t really include the economic side.

I suspect we may be on our way toward the possibility of something like Aaron Bastani’s “Fully Automated Luxury Communism” — an economy in which AI-powered robots become quite capable of handling most, if not all, aspects of economic production, leaving us (at least in theory) with no more strenuous work to do than picking drone-delivered pizza up from the porch and remembering to put the boxes out for robot sanitation workers to whisk away.

In that scenario, a Universal Basic Income would simply serve as a rationing mechanism. Scarcity would still exist. Letting everyone order a new Ferrari each week (after crashing the old one for fun) could bring the system down pretty quickly. You’d have to decide between three pizzas or one ribeye dinner, etc., so as not to strain our robot servants’ productive capacity.

I’m not an economist, and I apologize for playing one on the Internet, but I hope you see my point: Inspiring economic activity may not be a necessary feature of a UBI.

The trial results are GREAT news for Fully Automated Luxury Communism types … and for authoritarians who prefer fewer limits to their power over other people.

A UBI wouldn’t really be “universal.” Some groups (prison inmates, for example) would find themselves excluded from the start, with political dissidents, sooner or later, following them into the “no money for you” abyss. The latter would be too busy working (if there were any jobs to be had) or starving to inconvenience our “benevolent” rulers. That threat would leave them with an entirely free hand (holding a robot-manufactured whip).

Would I love to receive a “subsistence wage,” gratis, no questions asked? Who wouldn’t? But the devils in the details sound more like hell than like utopia.

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