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On the Gross Fiscal Negligence of the Washington GOP

Lew Rockwell Institute - Gio, 29/05/2025 - 05:01

The gross negligence of the Washington GOP with respect to its fundamental duty in the governance process of American democracy—to function as the Watchdog of the US Treasury—seems to know no bounds. Very simply, with current policies fixing to add $22 trillion of baseline deficits over the next decade on top of the $36 trillion of public debt already on the books, the only plausible ” One Big Beautiful Bill” (OBBB) for an honest conservative party would be a plan to slash the baseline deficits by material amounts—-say $8 trillion over the next decade, at minimum.

But even that would mean a $50 trillion public debt by the mid 2030s and potentially a rolling disaster from there—-as the Baby Boom driven OASDI rolls surge upwards to 100 million recipients by mid-century. And yet, the imposters, double talkers, rightwing statists, military/industrial complex-footmen and Trumpites (yes, we do repeat ourselves) who now dominate the party on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue are having a leisurely debate about how much to add to the $22 trillion of new red ink already baked into the cake.

That’s right. Rather than urgently pursuing the ways and means to make subtractions from these enormous baseline spending columns—a target rich venue that amounts to upwards of $90 trillion over the decade ahead—they are proverbially fiddling while any hope of saving the nation’s fiscal bacon literally burns.

If nothing else, a Republican White House with even nominal regard for fiscal rectitude would be sounding the alarm about the surging red ink flowing from the FY 2025 budget through April. As it happens, a macro-economy which is teetering on the edge of recession still has had enough residual gumption to generate a 4.9% 0r $146 billion revenue increase YTD. So that last gasp of economic growth-driven revenue gain should have been seen as a godsend bridge to enable time for launching a full bore attack on spending.

Nothing doing at the Trump White House, of course, the short-lived exertions of the now departing Elon Musk and his DOGE boys to the contrary notwithstanding. In fact, Federal outlays during the first seven months of FY 2025 were up by more than double the revenue gain—-that is, by +9% and $340 billion.

And, yes, these billowing gains were spread across-the-board. Indeed, in most case the increases YTD are so large that any fiscally responsible White House would have sent a five-alarm package of rescissions and entitlement curtailments to Capitol Hill within weeks of the inauguration.

FY 2025 April YTD Spending Increases By Federal Agency:

Commerce: +100.0%.
Homeland: +52.3%.
Interior: +43.8%.
Veterans: +16.6%.
DOT: +12.7%.
USDA: 11.0%.
HHS: +10.7%.
Interest Expense: +9.6%.
Social Security Administration: +8.8%.
DOD: +8.3%.
Energy: 7.3%.

Indeed, in what is surely a case of the dog which didn’t bark, the Trump Administration has not yet sent a single dollar of rescissions to the Hill—even after the DOGE boys mustered up a sweeping roadmap for exactly that. So the pathetic claim that the nation’s festering fiscal catastrophe was all the fault of “Joe Biden” just doesn’t wash. Without even trying hard, the White House could have hoovered-up a $100 billion rescission package of defense and nondefense discretionary spending cuts just to get the ball rolling.

Yet that default on out-of-control departmental spending came on top of Trump’s taking off the table Social Security, Medicare, Veterans and defense, along with mandatory payments on the debt that now exceed $1 trillion per year—even as he essentially urged the GOP to give Medicaid a hall pass, too. Rather than offering a modicum of push-back on the latter, however, the alleged conservative Senator from Missouri, Josh Hawley, spoke for much of the GOP caucus when he echoed Trump’s behind closed doors admonition not to “f‑‑‑ with Medicaid”:

“I hope congressional Republicans are listening,” Hawley wrote in a Tuesday post, re-sharing a report about Trump telling the GOP at the meeting to leave Medicaid alone.

Hawley has long warned his party against Medicaid cuts, writing in a New York Times op-edearlier this month that slashing health care for the working poor “is both morally wrong and politically suicidal.”

Of course, the Dem rhetoric is that deep cuts in Medicaid will be used to fund tax cuts for the rich. Never mind that sweeping Medicaid reforms are badly needed and fully justified given that the rolls have grown from 40 million to 80 million since the year 2000 alone—even as total Medicaid spending has more than quadrupled and real benefits per recipient have grown by nearly 30%.

Total Federal/State Medicaid Spending and Recipients, 2000–2024

Still, that’s exactly the political pickle that GOP put itself in when it passed the unpaid for multi-trillion s0-called TCJA of 2017. That is, rather than stand behind these corporate and individual tax cuts on a permanent basis with offsetting spending cuts, the cowardly GOP tax writers in December 2017 caused most of the TCJA to expire in December 2025. That enabled the bill to comply with Congressional reconciliation process rules—no long run deficit increase—but it also left on the doorstep of a future Congress a tremendous due bill amounting to $4 trillion of built-in tax increases over the next 10-year budget window.

Needless to say, the GOP is now so obsessed with avoiding the massive 2026 tax increase that it planted squarely in the tax code that any spending cut that it can get a consensus for—such as the relatively superficial cuts in Medicaid and food stamps in the OBBB—will be going not to desperately needed reduction of the baseline deficit, but to paying the due bill on its eight years-ago tax cut. And as it does, it will be giving the Dems still another opportunity to demagogue about heartless Republicans taking food stamps and medical insurance from poor people to pay for tax cuts for the rich.

And, yes, that’s actually the math of the One Big Beautiful Bill approved by the House last week. Fully 55% or $2.1 trillion of the $3.8 trillion cost of extending the TCJA will go to the top 5% of households with incomes of $250,000 or more.

But here’s the thing. The top 5% are already being taxed to the gills and actually face a marginal Federal rate of nearly 45% when you add the extra Medicare and investment income taxes to the 39.5% top rate in the regular schedule. Accordingly, in 2022 the top 5% accounted for 61% of all of Uncle Sam’s income tax collections.

Moreover, in the case of the blue states, where much of the $6.1 trillion of AGI attributable to the top 5% is earned, combined Federal/state/city marginal tax rates are well above 50%. So there is every reason of fairness and economic incentives to roll back the top marginal tax rate to 37% because the producer classes should never have even that much confiscated from their earnings in the first place.

And yet and yet. The “stupid party” insists on setting itself up for the kind of demagogic attacks that are being waged in the Senate right now because it insists on playing budgetary shell games with the tax-code—all of which sooner or later come back to bite it in the political arse time and again.

So once again all the new provisions for eliminating tax cuts on tips and overtime, off-setting deductions on Social Security income and deductions for interest on car loans are set to expire in 2028, creating yet another tax increase cliff just a few years down the road. The fact is, if the intended permanent tax reductions in the OBBB were scored honestly, the true cost—including added debt service—would be well more than $5 billion over the next 10-year budget widow.

So there you have it. A $22 trillion baseline deficit which should subjected to all out subtraction and shrinkage is getting another $5 trillion dose of red ink because the so-called conservative party has lost its mind on the fiscal front.

Yet when pressed, Republican politicians repair to the delusion that tax cuts will largely pay for themselves by stimulating additional economic growth and a resulting re-flow of higher revenues and lower unemployment related spending.

Except. Except.”Growing” your way out of fiscal policy deficits has been a bogus theory ever since the Lafferites invented it in the early 1980s and even bamboozled the Gipper with its endless repetition. In truth, this hoary claim is both wrong in theory and has never been even remotely proven in practice.

There is one powerful core reason for this inconvenient truth: To wit, Federal revenues are driven by nominal GDP, not so-called real GDP. To be sure, the tax brackets are indexed to prevent bracket creep, but when wages go up by 4% owing to 2% inflation and 2% real gains, taxable income is 4% higher. And if the mix is 4% real growth and 0% inflation, taxable income is still just 4% higher.

Indeed, the whole theory of tax cuts is that lower rates will increase the supply of labor hours offered in the market, as well as the supply of other factors of production such as productivity fostering capital investment. These additional supply-side resources, in turn, would tend to reduce costs and inflationary pressures.

That is to say, all thing equal supply side tax cuts will help improve the mix as between the inflation component and the real component of nominal GDP. But as far as the US Treasury is concerned, it is nominal income that is reported on 1040s and nominal revenues that are collected in withholding tax payments.

So the question recurs. Is there any reason to assume that the tax provisions of the GOP’s OBBB will cause nominal GDP, as opposed to real GDP, to be higher over the next decade than is assumed in the CBO baseline?

As shown below, the CBO baseline which projects $22 trillion of deficits over the next decade assumes that nominal GDP will grow at a 4.20% compound rate, generating a total of $371.5 trillion of nominal GDP over the period. In turn, baseline revenue under current law of $67.167 trillion amounts to 18.1% of nominal GDP.

As it happens, the growth rate of nominal GDP between Q4 2007 and Q1 2025 was, well, exactly4.21% per annum. And that was during a period in which there was massive monetary expansion and stimulus.

To wit, between Q4 2007 and Q1 2025, Federal Reserve credit outstanding—or what is otherwise described as high powered money—rose at the staggering rate of 12.5% per annum. And, folks, we do not believe there is a snowballs’ chance in the hot place that the Eccles Building will be in a position to run the Fed’s printing presses at anything close to that red hot rate during the decade ahead.

Obviously, that certainty is owing to the fact that the Fed finally let the inflation genie out of the bottle, and is now engaged in a rearguard struggle to bring it down to even close to its supposedly sacrosanct 2.00% target. So we believe the Fed’s printing presses will stay close to idle for many years to come, yet without inflationary stimulus from the Fed there is absolutely no reason to believe that the nominal GDP growth rate will accelerate. Indeed, if the US economy generates even the 4.2% nominal growth CAGR embodied in the CBO baseline, it will be something of an economic miracle.

So under no circumstances is it reasonable to assume more than CBO’s $371.2 trillion of nominal GDP will materialize over the next decade. Art Laffer’s napkin to the contrary notwithstanding, therefore, there is no way that Federal revenue even under current law would come in higher than the $67 trillion already in the CBO baseline for FY 2026-2035. Under the circumstances, in fact, the CBO baseline already amounts to Rosy Scenario Redux.

CBO Baseline Assumptions For Nominal GDP, Real GDP, Interest Rates and CPI, FY 2026-2035

To be sure, it is possible that the implicit mix of inflation and growth will vary from the CBO assumptions, which peg real GDP growth at 1.9% per annum and the implicit GDP deflator at 2.3% in alignment with the CPI assumption shown in the table above. But even a shift to real growth of, say 2.9%, and a corresponding reduction of inflation to 1.3% per annum, won’t make a dimes worth of difference in the budget numbers owing to what might be termed the second Inconvenient Truth about economic growth and budget impact.

The idea that higher economic growth is significantly favorable to the budget is essentially an obsolete Keynesian axiom reflective of a time when the US economy was driven by Workfare, as opposed to today’s overwhelming dominance by Welfare. Under the older Keynesian formulation, an economy operating at well less than full employment would generate a surge in unemployment insurance (UI) payments, which, in turn, would balloon the deficit. And that was supposedly a good thing because unemployment payments would cushion the fall of wage-based consumption spending, thereby braking the recessionary contraction; and then such counter-cycle UI outlays would automatically shrink as the economy recovered.

Whatever the once-upon-a-time merits of this counter-cyclical budget model, it is surely vestigial today. The CBO baseline spending for FY 2026, for instance, includes $4.2 trillion of outlays for Welfare State programs including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Veterans Benefits and food stamps versus just $38 billion for unemployment insurance. UI spending is thus a mere 0.9% of the Welfare State budget, and the latter is almost entirely insensitive to the state of the macro-economy.

Accordingly, even a tripling of unemployment insurance spending owing to weaker than forecast real growth and employment would hardly make a ripple in Federal spending and deficits. On the other hand, of course, higher real growth than the 1.9% per annum rate assumed in the CBO baseline would not make a damn bit of difference to Federal spending, either.

In the first place, higher growth as we have indicated is largely irrelevant to the giant Welfare State budget: virtually none of the 145 million people who receive these benefits work or have jobs to loose anyway.

At the same time, the CBO forecast essentially assumes full-employment for the entire period, meaning that the de minimis $38 billion projected for Unemployment Insurance outlays in FY 2026 and the years beyond is driven overwhelmingly by on-going “frictional” unemployment that is present even in a so-called full-employment economy. An even stronger economy than CBO optimistically assumes, therefore, wouldn’t reduce the cyclical component of UI spending because there isn’t one embedded in the baseline spending numbers.

In short, higher real growth owing to supply side tax cuts under today’s factual circumstances is likely to neither boost revenue collections materially nor reduce spending levels by measurable amounts relative to the CBO baseline. Accordingly, there is precious little revenue re-flow or so-called dynamic effect of modestly higher economic growth rates on the deficit outcomes.

The current catastrophic path of the Federal budget, therefore, can only be addressed by politically painful decisions to slash spending including entitlements and defense or force the people to pay higher taxes for the bloated level of government spending that no one wants to meaningfully challenge.

Nor are we talking pure theory and economic logic. The proof is actually in the pudding from the 2017 Trump tax cut itself. Owing to the immense cumulative distortions in the US economy owing to decades of money-printing and cheap debt, the Trump tax cut—even on the business side—got mostly captured by Wall Street speculators rather than fueling main street growth.

At the time of enactment in December 2017, net business investment in the US economy was already at an all-time low of just under 3.0% of GDP. As is evident from the graph, investment levels relative to the size of the economy have actually continued to shrink, notwithstanding cutting the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% and supplying an additional $75 billion per year of incentives for CapEx by unincorporated businesses via the 20% investment deduction.

Business CapEx (nonresidential fixed investment) As % Of GDP, 1971 to 2023

The question arises, of course, as to where all the increased corporate cash flow from the sharp reduction in businesses taxes actually ended up. But, alas, the latter is no mystery. The money-printing policies of the Fed over the nearly four decades since Alan Greenspan took the helm at the Fed have turned Wall Street into a veritable casino, where gamblers reward the C-suites of America for financial engineering maneuvers like stock buybacks, leveraged recaps and outright LBOs rather than productive investment in plant, equipment and technology on main street.

Consequently, operating cash flows of the S&P 500, for instance, rose from $6.972 trillion during the six year period before the 2017 tax cut (2012-2017) to $8.929 trillion during the six year afterwards (2018 through 2023) or by +28%. At the same time, dividends rose by +49% and stock buybacks by +42% as between the two periods.

In total dollars, the gain of $1.957 trillion of operating cash flow during 2018 through 2023 compared to the prior six-year period was offset by an increase of $2.407 trillionin returns to shareholders. Stated differently, 123% of the corporate tax cut-assisted gain in operating cash flows of the S&P 500 companies ended up being flushed back through Wall Street in the form of dividends and stock buybacks!

Indeed, with 87% of operating cash flows being devoted to dividends and stock buybacks during 2018-2023, there was only $1.161 trillion left for net investment on main street. That compared to the 76% shareholder return ratio during the six years before the Trump tax cut, which had left $1.673 trillion for net investment on main street.

That’s right. The availability of cash flows for net investment on main street declined by $512 billion or 31% during the six years after the 2017 tax cut. What this indicates, of course, is that all things are not equal. The rampant money-printing of the Fed has so corrupted Wall Street that even purported supply-side tax cuts have been diverted into increased levels of rent-seeking speculation and financial engineering.

S&P 500: Aggregate Cash From Operations, Free Cash Flow, Dividends, Stock Buybacks And Total Returns To Shareholders, 2004 to 2023.

For want of doubt, here are two additional measures of economic performance for the years before and after the 2017 tax cuts. In the case of real economic growth, as measured by real final sales, the annualized gain deteriorated sharply during the post-tax cut period, falling from 2.56% per annum during the five years ending in Q4 2017 to 2.27% per annum in the period since then.

In the case of real wage and salary income, the comparison is even more negative. The growth rate of real wages has deteriorated by nearly one-fifth since 2017.

Per Annum Inflation-Adjusted Growth In Wage and Salary Incomes:

2010-2017: +2.43%.
2017-2024: +1.92%.

At the end of the say, there are no if, ands or buts about it. The Trumpified GOP has served-up a veritable Debt Bomb, and there is no case whatsoever that the US economy can grow its way out of the $30 trillion of new debt the Donald’s Big Beautiful Bill is about to dump upon the already debt-entombed main street economy.

And yet and yet. The GOP has been singing the “grow your way out” anthem so long that even now it continues to bury its collective head in the sand on this canard. For instance, GOP Rep. Ron Estes of Kansas told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the problem is not Republican cowardice, but that the CBO green eye-shades have been lying.

“Unfortunately, we’ve seen time and again that the CBO scores Democrats’ spending priorities favorably and Republicans’ tax relief unfavorably. CBO falsely claimed that Republicans’ Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) would reduce tax receipts for the Treasury. In reality, TCJA exceeded CBO’s predictions for tax receipts by more than $1 trillion while growing the economy for everyday Americans.”

Well, no. Here is the CBO forecast of April 2018 on the Federal revenue outlook after the enactment of TCJA compared to the actual. Yes, it does appear that CBO under-estimated nominal revenue by upwards of $1.5 trillion over the 2019 to 2024 period. But that was almost entirely due to higher than forecast inflation, not more real growth.

To wit, the CBO forecast at the time of the TCJA enactment assumed real growth of 2.0% per anum through 2024. In fact, the actual figure was 2.1% per year or more than close enough for government work.

What generated the 5.7% over shoot of actual revenues for FY 2018 to FY 2024 was higher inflation, which came in a 3.5% per year versus the 2.3% embedded in the CBO baseline.

CBO 2018 Forecast Versus Actual Revenues, Growth and Inflation

And, yes, Americans had higher nominal incomes and made higher nominal tax payments, but real wealth and living standards grew almost entirely in line with the original CBO forecast.

Neither, unfortunately, did those inflated revenues close the deficit gap. That’s because 52% higherthan forecast inflation caused off-setting increases in spending and interest payments, too. In fact, just for entitlements with a statutory COLA adjustment, actual spending levels were $320 billion higher than would have been the case under the inflation path in the April 2018 CBO projections.

In short, the main impact of the TCJA was to bury the US electorate even deeper in debt—a condition that the GOP shows no interest in ameliorating in the slightest.

Reprinted with permission from David Stockton’s Contra Corner.

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Jesus Called People Morons: The Sacred Insult That Could Save a Civilization

Lew Rockwell Institute - Gio, 29/05/2025 - 05:01

Have you ever had one of those jarring moments when the lyrics of a song you once jammed to as a kid suddenly hit you with grown-up clarity? Maybe it was hearing Free Bird and suddenly realizing the masses in your high school were swaying to a breakup anthem. Or perhaps at your kids’ Catholic athletic event it struck you that “if you’re into evil you’re a friend of mine” (AC/DC’s Hells Bells) might not be the best fire-up song (pun intended). One of my personal favorites was discovering the biting genius behind Bugs Bunny’s old jab, “What a maroon!”—a mispronounced moron, cloaked in Looney Tunes levity but hitting with uncanny precision.

In this age of moral preening—where every tribe, every talking head, invokes Jesus Christ as the mascot of their cause—here’s the mic drop no one saw coming: Jesus called people morons.

Let’s not sentimentalize or sanitize this. Let’s not mistake it for a clever quip or a throwaway insult. No, in the unflinching light of Matthew 23, Christ—the Incarnate Word, the Author of all goodness, truth, and beauty—looks the most religious men of His day in the eye and calls them μωροί (moroi). Fools. Morons. He does this not to demean but to awaken; not to shame but to judge rightly—and to invite us to do the same.

Not for the sake of casting stones but for the sake of being formed, let’s go there.

When Christ condemned the Pharisees, He did not merely call them blind—He called them μωροί (moroi), the very root of our modern insult moron. “You blind fools!” He thunders in Matthew 23:17. “For which is greater, the gold or the temple that made the gold sacred?”

This wasn’t a slight at their intelligence. It was a judgment on their willful disconnection from reality. The Pharisees weren’t stupid—they were the most educated men of their time. But in the words of G.K. Chesterton, “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. He is the man who has lost everything but his reason.” That was the Pharisee: spiritually precise, morally unanchored.

The Greek word moros doesn’t mean “uninformed.” It means “dull,” “insipid,” “without savor.” It’s the same root Christ uses to describe salt that has lost its saltiness (Matthew 5:13)—once potent, now worthless. In Matthew 7:26, He warns against the man who hears truth but refuses to live it, calling him moros, a fool building on sand. The word points not to mental deficiency but to moral decay.

This is spiritual blindness: not the inability to see but the refusal to see. And not just among leaders—Christ warns of “the blind leading the blind” (Matthew 15:14) because moral deception often requires an audience that prefers the dark.

This spiritual condition has become the organizing principle of an entire culture. We live in a time when moral inversion is not the exception—it’s the rule. Our public rhetoric is laced with oxymorons not as occasional ironies but as systemic doctrines.

Consider the prevailing catechism of our governing elite:

Abortion as “health care”
Indicting political opponents as “justice”
DEI mandates that exclude for the sake of inclusion
Denying biology in the name of “gender identity”
“Following the science”—until it challenges the narrative
A “free press” that suppresses inconvenient truths

These contradictions aren’t random. They are the fruit of moros logic: when language is severed from reality and blindfolds are treated as badges of enlightenment.

And this brings us, not as a detour but as an inevitable illustration, to the figure who has most exposed this contradiction: Donald Trump.

For nearly a decade, Trump has been cast as a singular evil—fascist, racist, misogynist, dictator-in-waiting. Yet, under his first term, it was the “oppressed classes”—black Americans, Latinos, women, the working class—who experienced rising wages, record-low unemployment, and economic mobility.

In 2024, after four years of cultural gaslighting, censorship, and lawfare, those same groups moved toward him—not because they believed he was flawless but because they saw. They remembered. They refused to keep playing the part of blind followers in a theater of absurdity.

This is the great irony: those screaming “tyranny” the loudest were often the ones imposing it—from university speech codes to federal mandates, from the erasure of women’s sports to the surveillance of parents at school board meetings. The people didn’t just vote against that—they recoiled from it. They refused to call evil good, or good evil. They took off the blindfold.

As Catholics, we must not lose sight of what it means to affirm the truth in a person or policy without canonizing the man himself. Trump has boldly professed a pro-life stance, not only in policy—appointing justices that helped overturn Roe v. Wade—but also through quiet, often unseen acts of generosity: paying off mortgages for struggling families, stepping in to help veterans, funding educational scholarships. These were not headline-grabbing gestures but real assistance rendered quietly, human to human.

Yet, we must also call him to account. His support for IVF and his inability—or unwillingness—to confront the commodification of human life at its earliest stage must not be glossed over. A culture of life must be consistent, or it will collapse under the weight of its exceptions. As Catholics, we must be Trump’s grateful allies where truth prevails—and his prophetic challengers where it does not. We do not worship politicians. We worship a God who is Truth itself.

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The End of Neoconservatism

Lew Rockwell Institute - Gio, 29/05/2025 - 05:01

In what can be called a victory speech over failed neoconservative foreign policy, President Donald Trump proclaimed the end of 30-some years of existing foreign policy in the Mideast. The ideology dragged the U.S. through pointless wars from Libya to Yemen is now dead.

At an investment conference in Riyadh, in a speech little-commented on by the mainstream media, Trump said, “In the end, the so-called nation builders wrecked far more nations than they built. And the interventionalists [sic] were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand.”

For the first time since the First Gulf War in the 1990s, America is not fighting in the Middle East. Trump arranged a fragile ceasefire with Yemen, where multiple U.S. presidents have waged a proxy war against Iran. Trump is withdrawing American troops from Syria, became the first American president in 25 years to meet with a Syrian leader, and announced alongside his speech the end of sanctions against that country. He is finally negotiating with Iran toward some sort of nuclear deal to replace the one he unilaterally canceled in his first term. Progress has not always been in a straight line, but there has been progress.

One need only to look back on the past decades to see the difference. The United States once overtly supported Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran, leading to thousands of deaths on both sides. Pivoting, the U.S. invaded Iraq in 1991 after Saddam moved into Kuwait. Saudi Arabia was threatened, saved from war by U.S. intervention because of its oil reserves, which the U.S. was then fully dependent on. In the neocon spasms following 9/11, America invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, launching a nation-building plan in both countries to displace national governments with American puppet states and local Islamic traditions with Western ideas on women and society.

Those nation-building actions gave support to warnings issued by Al Qaeda and ISIS that the west sought to neuter Islam and turn the Middle East into a part of a new global empire. Rumors circulated that American troops in Iraq were issued maps of the Syrian border ahead of plans to turn the massive military to sweep west into Syria and Lebanon following the “conquest” of Iraq. As that war brought Iran into the fight, U.S. troops were deployed to Syria, the Turks threatened invasion, and Russian intervention complicated the struggle. ISIS rose to replace Al Qaeda. The U.S. began a war in Libya, overthrowing another ugly but stable government, leading to chaos which continues to this day. Massive streams of refugees flowed into Europe. Yemen dissolved into anarchy and civil war. The Afghan war threatened to spill into Pakistan.

Though actual numbers can never be known, the Costs of War Project estimates over 940,000 people died directly as a result of violence due to American foreign policy in the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. An additional 3.6–3.8 million died indirectly due to factors like malnutrition, disease, and the breakdown of healthcare systems related to these conflicts. The total death toll, including both direct and indirect casualties, is estimated to be between 4.5 and 4.7 million. The Costs of War Project also highlights the significant displacement caused by these conflicts, with an estimated 38 million people displaced since 2001. Some 7,000 U.S. military service members died. The Project estimates the wars cost the U.S. over $8 trillion. Afghanistan today is again ruled by the Taliban, Iraq by Iranian proxies. Nation-building was a complete failure. The broader neoconservative interventionist policy failed.

Indeed, the best summation of America’s decades long policy in the Middle East is Trump’s.

Words are easy, actions often much harder. So what is next? Trump stated his “fervent wish” that Saudi Arabia follow its neighbors, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, in recognizing Israel. He said a nuclear deal is within sight with Iran, adding he “never believed in having permanent enemies.” Both are hard asks.

But in a sign of what may be the most significant change alongside the new foreign policy, Trump met the new leader of Syria, Ahmed al-Sharaa, a former Al Qaeda jihadist (one makes peace with one’s enemies, not one’s friends) who led a rebel alliance that ousted Bashar al-Assad. Trump posed for a photograph with al-Sharaa and the Saudi crown prince that “dropped jaws in the region and beyond.”

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Recycling Old News Media Push for More War in Ukraine

Lew Rockwell Institute - Gio, 29/05/2025 - 05:01

Yesterday, during a lengthy interview, the German Chancellor Friedrich Merz mention the lifting of restrictions on western weapons used by Ukraine.

Media took that as a new revelation:

Merz says no more range limits for weapons supplied to Kyiv – DW, May 26
Germany’s Merz backs Ukraine’s long-range missile strikes on Russia – FT, May 26
Western allies lift Ukraine’s restrictions on long-range weapons, says Merz – Euronews, May 26

> German Chancellor Friedrich Merz announced on Monday that Germany, along with France, the UK and the US, had lifted restrictions on the range of weapons they are sending to Ukraine to help in the fight against Russia.

“There are no longer any range restrictions on weapons delivered to Ukraine — neither by the British nor by the French nor by us nor by the Americans,” he said at the WDR Europaforum 2025 at the re:publica digital conference in Berlin. <

Some media even claimed that Merz had cleared the path for the delivery of German Taurus cruise missiles to Ukraine:

Germany and its key allies have lifted range restrictions on weapons sent to Ukraine allowing Kyiv to hit targets inside Russia with no external limits, Chancellor Friedrich Merz said Monday.

That announcement by the German leader could clear the path for Berlin to finally deliver its powerful Taurus cruise missiles to Kyiv, something that the previous government refused to do so as not to provoke nuclear-armed Russia.

I was astonished seeing this. There had been nothing new in Merz’ announcement.

President Joe Biden had lifted all restrictions on U.S. delivered weapons many months ago:

Biden allows Ukraine to use US arms to strike inside Russia – Reuters, Nav 18 2024

Britain had even been earlier:

UK gives Ukraine green light to use British weapons inside Russia – Atlantic Council, May 3 2024

France, also many moths ago, had likewise been open to this.

Moreover Ukraine has long run out of western donated long range weapons:

The green light to fire long-range missiles at Russia means little if “our cupboard is totally empty,” added Ivan Stupak, a former officer with Ukraine’s SBU security service.”

The last ATACMS strike on Russian targets has happened many months ago. The last interdiction of an ATMCMS strike by Russia was reported on January 17. Strikes with British Storm Shadow or French Scalp missiles have likewise vanished.

There was thereby nothing new in Merz’ talk. He had not even mentioned Taurus missiles which will NOT be delivered to Ukraine for several good reasons:

Taurus contains components which are under U.S. export restrictions. The U.S. would have to green light a delivery of those.
Taurus is air launched. Ukraine does not have the means, i.e. the right airplanes, to launch Taurus from high attitudes.
Taurus requires other German systems, and, most crucial, German specialists to be targeted and used.

Merz was clearly surprised that his mentioning of the release of restrictions, which had happened months ago, was suddenly presented as a new development or policy change. Today the chancellor was pushed to clarify it:

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said that the decision to lift restrictions on the range of weapons supplied to Kiev was made several months ago, RIA Novosti reported.

“As far as I know, and I repeated it yesterday, the countries that imposed range restrictions have long since abandoned these conditions. Therefore, yesterday in Berlin I described what happened several months ago, namely that Ukraine has the right to use the weapons it receives, including outside its borders, against military targets on Russian territory,” Merz said at a joint press conference with Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo.

The media who carried yesterday’s sensational headline have yet to wake up to this. I doubt that they even want to do so. They will most likely ignored Merz’ clarification.

There is an unmissable war-frenzy in the media. Even the tiniest side remark by Trump, Merz or someone else is immediately explained as a war escalation.

The journalists writing those headlines, and the bloggers repeating them, seem eager to push for it.

Who told them to do so?

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

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Kritarchy Is Taking Over America

Lew Rockwell Institute - Gio, 29/05/2025 - 05:01

Remember a year ago when the US BORDER WAS WIDE OPEN and vast numbers of immigrant-invaders were being helped into our country by the Democrats? NO FEDERAL JUDGE ANYWHERE DID ANYTHING ABOUT THE TOTAL FAILURE OF THE DEMOCRATS TO DEFEND US BORDERS.

NOW THAT THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION IS TRYING TO SEND THE ILLEGALS BACK, THERE IS NO END OF JUDGES AT WORK PREVENTING THE EJECTION OF THOSE WHO ENTERED ILLEGALLY.

The executive branch, which had been rising in power since the George W. Bush/Dick Cheney regime, is now unable to perform its lawfully required duty to protect America’s border without appealing to the Supreme Court for help against a politicized anti-American Democrat political operative in a judicial robe. Large numbers of these despicable creatures have arisen to deny that the President of the United States has any powers of his office. He must do what they say.

This is a massive change from the George W. Bush regime when President Bush declared his power to hold US citizens indefinitely on suspicion alone without evidence or due process or law. The judiciary had nothing to say.

This is again a massive change from President Obama’s assertion that he had the power to execute American citizens on suspicion alone without due process of law. The judiciary had nothing to say.

It is only when a president exercises his clear authority to deport illegal entrants into the US that the judiciary opens its corrupt mouth. I have no idea why MAGA-Americans and the Trump administration put up with an utterly corrupt anti-American, anti-white, collection of despicable robed tyrants. Why aren’t they deported? President Lincoln deported a US Representative who disagreed with Lincoln’s invasion of the Confederacy.

In the first months of the Trump administration we have seen time and again judges assuming they are God exercising rule over the electorate.

This time, and there will be several more by tomorrow, Trump is appealing to the US Supreme Court for the judiciary’s permission for him to exercise the powers of his office. In an office somewhere in the 50 states a robed political activist has ruled that Trump cannot deport illegals unless DHS (Department of Homeland Security) first satisfies an onerous set of procedures invented by the district court political activist “judge” to assess any potential claim under the Convention Against Torture. See here.

Tell me, MAGA-Americans, how the Trump administration can deport millions of illegal entrants under these conditions. It cannot be done.

I conclude that no more than perhaps a thousand or two of illegal entrants will ever be deported, which means that American white European ethnicity is being watered down and America is being transformed into a multicultural Tower of Babel devoid of a common belief system and unity. Essentially, America is being erased.

The MAGA Revolution has been brought to heel by the judiciary which is enforcing a Tower of Babel upon America.

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Loneliness

Lew Rockwell Institute - Gio, 29/05/2025 - 05:01

“Let there be loneliness, for where there is loneliness, there is also love, and where there is suffering, there is also joy.” – Clark E. Moustakas, Loneliness

As regular readers of this column may know, I like to begin each edition with a story from my life that I hope encapsulates the theme of the book I am featuring. When I started thinking about writing a column on loneliness, I’d sit down in my reading chair at home to quiet my mind or I’d go for a walk in my pleasant neighborhood amidst the fresh spring air and budding trees and search my memory for times when I felt lonely. As I thought back through my life in search of times of loneliness, I found that I either had none or that I had many. That is, it seems that either I’ve never been lonely, or I’ve been lonely most of my life and, like a fish in water, never really knew it because I had nothing else with which to compare it.

I do know that I’ve never felt lonely when I’ve been alone at my house or in some natural setting, such as a beach, or when I’ve gone on solitary retreats to a remote Buddhist monastery in Nova Scotia, or when I’d spent a month holed up in a ramshackle, off-the grid cabin on the rugged and gloriously desolate northern coast of Maine, far from the madding crowd. If pressed to recall times when I may have felt lonelier than others, it would have to be when I’ve been among other people—eating alone in boisterous restaurants, sitting in a crowded park, even walking down the sidewalks of New York City. So, when the evil ones rolled out the COVID-19 psyop with the lockdowns that were intended to isolate and atomize each of us into individual silos of lonely self-abnegation, thinking we’d eventually hate ourselves enough to give up our individual sovereignty and well-being, I never felt compelled to comply with the jab mandates that followed so I could return to socializing again.

I enjoy my own company or the company of my girlfriend or of a few close friends more than large gatherings of any sort. I’ve always felt this way. The smaller the group the better; and even those occasions are quite rare for me. All during the most rabid phases of the COVID-19 psyop throughout 2020 and 2021, I never felt that I had to trade in my individual autonomy and jump on the jabfest bandwagon to feel a part of any cause or group that was more valuable and more important than what I already had—and what I’ve always had as long as I can remember: a sense of self-possession.

At the time when the government was trying to ban any sort of socializing, I met some new, lovely, like-minded friends, and we got together regularly at our homes—unflappable, unafraid, unjabbed. Living our lives. But not according to the “new normal,” that charade of social distancing that was trotted out to “stop the spread” but was actually just one more nail in the coffin of civilization. Not that. But the old normal. And not one of us ever got sick with what was supposedly going around like wildfire and killing scores of victims all around the world. I knew it was a lie and so did the rest of us. As for myself, no one was going to be able to push me around or twist my arm or hold out some paltry reward like a carrot on a stick for me to chase—such as free doughnuts—to give me something I never wanted in the first place, then or ever.

On top of that, I soon figured out what was really going on and it had nothing to do with a public health crisis. It was a military operation designed to control us. I smelled it like you can smell the rain before the storm. I’d once lived in China and twice visited the Soviet Union. I learned from firsthand experience something about how totalitarian governments operate. So perhaps I’d had a kind of head start in putting together what would turn out to be millions of pieces of this multi-dimensional puzzle—a puzzle whose purpose was to bamboozle and terrorize the credulous masses. What I saw in China and the U.S.S.R. I saw happening here in America in the March 2020 assault on our sacrosanct ways of life, saw the actual threat to our democracy—not the fake threat of the populist movement ballyhooed by the lamestream media the past several years—unfolding before my eyes. It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. And as I tried to warn others, I saw my social circle, already small, shrink.

In just a few lines from her hefty 1948 tome, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt highlights the essence of what I saw happening with the COVID-19 psyop:

“Totalitarian government, like all tyrannies, certainly could not exist without destroying the public realm of life, that is, without destroying, by isolating men, their political capacities. But totalitarian domination as a form of government is new in that it is not content with this isolation and destroys private life as well. It bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man.”

This awareness has not made my life any easier from the spring of 2020 and right up to the present. I felt—and still feel—the pain of being shunned by many friends who’d allowed themselves to get caught up in the web of lies. I know others who, through their comments here on Substack or via personal emails, since I began writing about the COVID-19 psyop in the fall of 2021, were also shunned by others for not submitting to the diktats of the powers-that-should-not-be. What’s been particularly painful for them to experience—and for me to read about—is the shattering of familial bonds, which was also intended by the evil ones as a key component in their takedown of our culture. For instance, some of those who’ve contacted me are older parents who reluctantly submitted to the trickster jab crusade only because their children would not let them visit their grandchildren without their first getting inoculated. I find such ignorant cruelty utterly unfathomable.

While billions not only submitted to these heinous demands, for whatever their reasons, there are others who fully backed them. Many of us witnessed with helpless despair in our hearts people and organizations of considerable influence whip up angry, unhinged mobs coalescing around the jabfest at every turn—on television news, in newspapers, on TV talk shows, in governments at every level, and among the leaders of our nation’s corporations, schools, hospitals, and nonprofit organizations. You name it, the lies were everywhere. And hundreds of millions of people fell for them. By now, we’ve all heard the tired excuse: We didn’t know. I knew. As did so many others. Our pleas for sobriety fell on deaf ears just as they would a raging alcoholic deep in his cups.

What was driving this insanity? I think it was more than merely the fear of getting sick and dying. Stella Morabito, in a 2022 book of hers that I read around this time last year, The Weaponization of Loneliness: How Tyrants Stoke Our Fear of Isolation to Silence, Divide and Conquer, has this to say:

“It comes from a sense of alienation within the psyche of the individual who wants desperately to be a part of something. He wants to be part of an in-group, often associated with the slogan of being ‘on the right side of history,’ the group that will cure the supposed malady of social injustice. It’s a combination of alienation and the yearning to belong that is the true malady that sparks mob members into action.”

That’s what I think drove the madness, or at the very least fanned its flames.

Back in 1964, when I was 11 years old and Barbara Streisand crooned in the popular song “People” that “people who need people are the luckiest people in the world,” I remember thinking, no, they aren’t. Maybe the song was trying to sell something, to conjure up some beatific vision of dependency, allowing others to define us and bestow value to the self. Although I did not know that then, I was still having none of it. Or maybe my pre-pubescent, developing brain had indeed picked up what I now understand to be the song’s schmaltzy, sentimental, subliminal messaging: Those who don’t need people are the unluckiest people in the world and something must definitely be wrong with you.

Years later, I read Henry David Thoreau’s book, Walden. It was there that I found something that did resonate with my soul. He writes, “I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.” And I thought, yes, that’s it. These are the luckiest people in the world. And I’m happy that I can count myself among them. I’m not boasting. I’m not flattering myself. It’s merely the cloth out of which I am cut. Yet, I believe we can all learn how to savor solitude and find out why it’s important to deal with loneliness in a healthy manner.

Solitude and the sort of self-reliance and independent thought that Ralph Waldo Emerson writes about in his 1841 essay, “Self-Reliance,” nurture one another. Emerson writes:

“What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

Co-conspirators in breaking free from the suffocating Victorian conformity of their day, Thoreau and Emerson were chums. Just shy of his twenty-eighth birthday, Thoreau built himself a hut on the north shore of Walden Pond, a small (64.5 acres) and in a surprisingly deep (102 feet at its deepest) glacial “kettle hole” two miles south of Concord, Massachusetts, in the spring of 1845 on land that Emerson owned. Thoreau stayed there for two years. Emerson even paid Thoreau a visit from time to time. In the summer of 1847, a little more than two years after Thoreau first settled in at Walden Pond, Emerson invited him to stay with his wife and children, while Emerson himself went to Europe. Thoreau accepted the offer. In September 1847, he left his cabin and never returned. But he paid homage to his experience in a little gem of a book, which was published in 1854, whose popularity remains to this day. (Walden Pond is now a protected part of the Walden Pond State Reservation. There is a replica of Thoreau’s cabin on the grounds. The original site of the cabin is marked by a pile of stones.)\

Looking back through the years, I wonder if I came into the world unknowingly prepared for the COVID-19 psyop, as well as the myriad of social, political, media, military, and geoengineering ploys and exercises behind the structural decimation of Western civilization leading up to it, some of which I was aware of as they were happening, others of which I’ve only more recently learned about in hindsight, and some of which I’m still discovering. It’s not been a sudden baptism by fire for me; it’s been more like a slow burn, clearing away all the distractions that grow like weeds and have hidden the truth from all of us. No matter when or how these revelations have found me—or I have found them—in a mutual embrace, what I’ve seen I can no longer not see nor deny the unsettling conclusion that the material world is run by psychopaths.

Since one of the primary objectives of the COVID-19 psyop was to secure once and for all the isolation and atomization of each of us in order to compel us to submit to its evil diktats—the lockdowns, the closures, the masking, the jab mandates—to “stop the spread” so we could get back the life they took away from us, I was preternaturally immune to the real virus that was going around. And that virus is the fear of loneliness.

Read the Whole Article

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The Big Mistake They Made

Lew Rockwell Institute - Gio, 29/05/2025 - 05:01

You’ve probably heard about the turf war between the federal government – Donald Trump – and the state of California’s Air Resources Board (CARB) over who gets to decree “emissions” requirements for motor vehicles sold in California.

And not just in California.

CARB is a state-level bureaucracy that operates effectively as a national one by emitting regulations for California that are followed by the vehicle manufacturers because so many other states have aped CARB’s regulatory emissions that they are effectively obliged to manufacture only “California compliant” vehicles. It would be too expensive to make cars for California and the dozen other states (including New York and most of the New England states as well as western states such as Oregon and Washington) that have aped California’s regulatory regime and then make another batch and sell those in the other states that have not aped California’s regulatory regime.

It would have been much better for the manufacturers if they’d not kowtowed to California in the first place, which is just what they did a long time ago.

CARB began emitting regulations back in the ’70s. The regs required additional hardware be added to new vehicles in order for them to be legal to sell in the state. The regs also limited what could be sold in the state. For example, while GM’s Pontiac division could sell you a new 1979 Trans-Am with the 400 Pontiac V8 and a manual transmission in 49 states, you could only buy the car with the Oldsmobile 403 V8 and an automatic in California, because it was the only drivetrain that was compliant with CARB’s regs. Similarly, certain parts could not be legally sold in CA either unless they carried a “CARB” approved number. (This is still the case today, by the way. There are a plethora of parts that cannot be purchased in CA and that are illegal to install, even if it can be proved they do not increase emissions. Legally, ther only thing that matters is whether they’re . . . legal.)

GM’s mistake – the industry’s mistake – was to play along to begin with. That never works out – except to the benefit of your enemy. Arguably, what the vehicle manufacturers ought to have done – back in the ’70s – was to tell California its additionally onerous emissions regulations – which exceeded the federal EPA’s requirements – rendered it unfeasible for them to sell new vehicles in the state of California. That they could not justify the additional expense of adding equipment to cars sold only in California in order to be able to sell them legally in the state. This would very quickly have imparted pressure on California’s politicians to yank CARB’s chain because millions of Californians wanting to be able to buy a new car would have demanded it.

Instead, GM and the rest decided to pass the expense along to everyone else – by making all of the vehicles they sold everywhere else “California compliant.” This included the expense of the winnowing of choices, such as the option to buy a new vehicle with a certain engine or a manual transmission. If it could not be made “California compliant,” it could not be purchased anywhere – because it was no longer available for sale anywhere.

This worked – for awhile – in that car buyers in other states just dug a little deeper and paid more for vehicles that were now all of them “California compliant” even if they didn’t legally have to be. But as always happens whenever you comply with bullies, the bullying increased. CARB decreed new regs requiring “zero emissions” (i.e., battery powered) vehicles be sold in ever-increasing percentages until only “zero emissions” vehicles can be (legally) sold in the state by 2035 . Other states aped CARB, setting the stage for a national de facto electric vehicle mandate, since the only vehicles that can comply with the “zero emissions” regulatory requirement are electric vehicles. (It doesn’t matter, legally speaking, that the manufacture of electric vehicles and the generation of the electricity that powers up their battery packs results in lots of “emissions” – of the dread gas carbon dioxide that some insist is causing the “climate” to “change.” All that matters, legally speaking is that these “emissions” do not emanate from a vehicle’s exhaust pipe.)

This does not work – or rather, won’t – because most people who do not live in California do not want to be forced to buy an EV and couldn’t afford one, even if they did. The vehicle manufacturers are aware of this, but they have complied themselves into a corner. How do they walk it back? It is no easy thing to do. It is on par with getting out of a bad marriage you knew going into it wasn’t going to be good. How much easier it would be now if you’d never reluctantly said “I do” to begin with.

Read the Whole Article

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History Repeats? Germany’s New Leader Talks Tough About War With Russia

Lew Rockwell Institute - Mer, 28/05/2025 - 17:33

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Pope Leo and the IRS

Lew Rockwell Institute - Mer, 28/05/2025 - 17:17

Tim McGraw wrote:

Hi Bumper, Pope Leo and the IRS

Thanks for your excellent article on Pope Leo and the IRS. The story of Irwin Schiff’s treatment under “the law” by the IRS and a federal judge is horrific. There was no justice with the IRS. We all pay an exit tax either by renouncing our citizenship or when we die. The IRS wants it all.

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The Mark 84, 2000 Pound Bomb

Lew Rockwell Institute - Mer, 28/05/2025 - 17:12

Tim McGraw wrote:

The Mark 84, 2000 Pound Bomb

These are the big conventional bombs being used in wars today, including by Israel against Gaza.

General Dynamics is the main supplier of the bombs. They have 26 bomb plants in the US and Canada. The main bomb plant appears to be in Camden, Arkansas. They had an explosion there last year:

Explosion at General Dynamics Plant in Arkansas

The bombs cost $16,000 each.

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