Balancing The U. S. Budget

      President-elect Donald Trump has said his first act after he's sworn in on January 20 will be to appoint a task force to organize a Great American State Fair in Iowa to showcase the might of America on the nation's 250th anniversary in 2026. He has other big ideas to celebrate this anniversary.

     He has put Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy in charge of a new Department Of Government Efficiency tasked with dismantling bureaucracy, eliminating regulations, and cutting wasteful spending. In his Nov. 12, 2024, announcement about Musk and Ramaswamy's new role, Trump stated. "We will drive out the massive waste and fraud which exists throughout our annual $6.5 trillion government spending. They will work together to liberate our economy and make the U.S. government accountable to 'We The People.' Their work will conclude no later than July 4, 2026. A smaller government, with more efficiency and less bureaucracy, will be the perfect gift to America on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. I am confident they will succeed."

      Trump compared this new department, which only has power to issue recommendations to the federal government, to the Manhattan Project, implying that its success will be as important to America's survival as the World War II research program that produced the world's first atomic weapons. This is an apt analogy. The Congressional Budget Office projects that at current spending levels, America will be spending 20 per cent of tax revenue on the national debt within a decade - a financial and economic detonation. -  Andrew Miller

Taxation And Inflation

     "All government spending is taxation. The part that isn't covered by tax revenue becomes inflation. You're either taxed directly by the government or taxed by inflation, but you are for sure taxed."  - Elon Musk, American Tech Entrepreneur

The New Traditionalism

    We are looking for something. We have looked around, we have looked ahead, and now we are looking back. And when you look back, there are worlds to see. The entire heritage of western civilization. ...

     Trudging through the culture war ruins, how refreshing it is to come across these rare individuals who reject the modernist apparatus and who openly appreciate past agriculture, apparel, architecture, engineering, handcrafts, music, painting, philosophy, science and sculptures, and who believe God exists. It's a revitalizing respite from the dishonorable, gyrating, undignified, radical, seething, anti-humanism of the present. It's a special kind of connection, however small, with a brother in arms, because it joins us not only with each other but with something that is older and greater.

     It's worth remembering, though, that you and I must still exercise the virtue of discernment. We must love the things we love not because they are old, not because they are Western, not because they are ours, but because they are good. Conservatism requires discernment between good and evil. It is not preservation of everything from the past because it is past. Rather it is the conservation only of what is good. And the evil always mixes itself with good. It is easy to over-romanticize the past but overlook the costs of its triumphs and the blemishes of its heroes. Like the present, the past was permeated by both great achievement and great evil. That is exactly how we arrived at the present.

     After all, the way of life leading to moral and intellectual self-reliance ... then individual and civilizational self-destruction ... was rightly named the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

 - Philip Nice

New Book Release ... How The West Lost Ukraine: A Disaster Of Our Own Making, By Brandon J. Weichert

     In 1991, the Cold War ended in a bloodless victory for NATO. After 45 years of a grueling, nuclear-tinged Cold War, communism was dead, Eastern Europe was free, Russia looked to the West for how to build a better, freer future for itself, and liberal democracy and capitalism reigned supreme.

     But in the ruins of the last war lies the seeds for the next great conflict. Floating just beneath the surface of post-Cold War international relations was the question of what was to become of NATO with the loss of the Soviet Union as a threat. Western leaders believed expansion into the former Soviet states of Eastern Europe was the natural next step. But the Russians opposed this.

    For 30 years, a succession of Russian leaders—from Mikhail Gorbachev to Boris Yeltsin to Vladimir Putin—warned the West that NATO’s expansion into territories bordering Russia, notably into Ukraine, would trigger a violent response from Moscow. Yet, the West did not listen. Contrary to the popular narrative in the West, A Disaster of Our Own Making: How NATO Expansion Doomed Ukraine will show readers how Westerners created our current crisis with Russia and why innocent Ukrainians are being made to pay with their lives for the arrogance (and ignorance) of Western leaders in the post-Cold War era. Thanks to their hubris, the world now teeters on the brink of a potential nuclear world war over the status of Ukraine.   - Author, Brandon J. Weichert