No adult should go by an “ie” or “y” variation of their name – Billy, Timmy, etc. Once puberty hits, any man with self-respect prefers to drop it to sound less like a buddy and more like an adult. CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan doesn’t care. While it’s not “Donny,” and maybe it is Donie on his birth certificate, it doesn’t matter – you come off like a douche with the “y” sounds on a name that could easily be shortened to “Don.”
Donie, the porky Irishman CNN employs to cut their anti-Americanism with an accent, had a special Sunday night called “Misinformation: Extreme America” that was supposed to be about political extremism. It devolved into what seemed like an attempt to get him laid at the next These Lives Matter or Occupy Someplace mutant march/riots on the left.
It would only occur to a detestable human being to interview a detestable human being like Taylor Lorenz about the assassination of health care CEO Brian Thompson. It would take someone even worse to sit there and not say a word when Taylor says of the alleged assassin, “Here’s this man who, who’s a revolutionary, who’s famous, who’s handsome, who’s young, who’s smart — he’s a person that seems like a morally good man, which is hard to find.”
Thompson was shot in the back while simply walking down the street. Would Lorenz or O’Sullivan like that fate? If they survived, would they appreciate public expressions of lust for the person on video doing it? I somehow doubt it.
But the extreme left do not view anything their fellow evil creatures do if it’s in the name of their agenda. Hell, many of them excuse murder by members of their side if they view the perp to be productive enough, as individuals are disposable to the left. ANTIFA leader kills their girlfriend? No big deal, can’t make Utopia without breaking a few eggs…
The CNN special was a piece of progressive propaganda that would make Goebbels blush, with O’Sullivan concluding, “While America’s roots are soaked in bloodshed, violence in the country today is mostly from right-wing extremism. From Oklahoma City to Charlottesville to Jan. 6th … there is simply no equivalent on the left.”
It must be nice to be a Democrat, history begins anew every morning you wake up. Some trans activist shoots up a school one day and the next it didn’t happen. James Hodgkinson tries to murder as many Republicans as possible on a baseball field and your network moves off the story before Steve Scalise is off life-support. Roving bands of leftists spend a year trying to murder police officers, business owners, some mayors, and burn down buildings with people in them and it’s the “summer of love!”
Nope, it’s all Oklahoma City, Charlottesville and January 6th. Charlottesville, I’d argue, was actually a progressive action. It certainly wasn’t “right” or conservative. It was people want to use the power of government to impose their will on others, which is the hallmark of progressivism. That it was based on race is, well, what Democrats do, just not in the direction those people were marching for.
Conservatism is about individual liberties, not the collective.
As for January 6th, that’s the default position for all of them. Then they lie about the number of people murdered and lie that police officers were among them. Deaths by natural causes and suicides months later are not related to a bad three hours at work one day, there was a lot more at play at the time no “journalist” wants anyone to know about.
CNN is guy who thinks he can talk his way out of being dumped by a woman who has completely moved on and is already with someone else. There is no audience for MSNBC-lite because there’s barely an audience for MSNBC. Doubling down on stupid isn’t going to bring back people who left because you’re stupid, it will only remind them of the metaphorical bullet they dodged when they left.
Left-wing violence is everywhere in America today, ask any Jew on a college campus. But the left pretends it doesn’t exist or it’s somehow disconnected from their politics. They are Dr. Frankenstein denying paternity of his monster as it terrorizes the town.
But the monster always returns to the castle. While Donie ignores Democrats attacking Tesla drivers, damaging cars and shooting at dealerships, their monster tried to murder the Governor of Pennsylvania – returning to the Democrat castle. How can I say that? Because if the arsonist were in any way connected to the right, that’s all you’d hear about. That you barely hear about him, and won’t hear about him again likely by tomorrow, tells you all you need to know – the monster came home again.
Chuck Schumer didn’t cancel his book tour and public appearances because he was afraid Republicans would show up and cause violence…
ANAHEIM, CA — Singer and TV personality Katy Perry inspired dozens Thursday after declaring she was an astronaut following a brief ride on Disneyland's Astro Orbiter.
"Wheeeeee! I'm an astronaut!" she said while riding the thrilling Tomorrowland attraction. "Taking up spaaaace! I really feel in touch with the divine feminine now."
Perry described the ride as deeply supernatural, saying that it spun her around and around to the point that she felt "all the G's." She is now a bona fide astronaut, she says, because she got to pilot the spacecraft herself. "I can make it go up and down! Wheeeeee!"
Park guests who witnessed the historical moment say they will forever remember Katy Perry's ability to sit there and ride the attraction. "She's a trailblazer," said one mother of three. "It makes me feel like I can be an astro orbiter too."
At publishing time, Katy Perry was seen riding the Matterhorn Bobsleds, where she proclaimed, "I'm a Sherpa! Wheeeeeeee!"
In the midst of so much technological and social change this century, it is strange to remember that there are a couple hundred ancient tribes on Earth that have maintained unique cultures by isolating from the rest of the world. They know nothing of President Trump, European war, McDonald’s, or K-pop. They aren’t arguing over digital IDs, carbon rationing, personal pronouns, tariffs, China’s intellectual property theft, or Ukraine’s borders. To the best that we can tell, their societies operate as they have for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.
For much of the last five hundred years, explorers and settlers did not particularly worry about preserving the indigenous cultures with which they came into contact. On the contrary, most felt they had a moral duty to spread their own civilizational values around the world. It was only after we had assimilated nearly every hidden tribe on the planet that we began to ask questions and pull back. Over the last forty years, prevailing opinion has held that by forcing “modernity” upon isolated peoples, we not only risk deleting distinct cultures, but also risk deleting valuable parts of our shared human story.
Needless to say, nobody is advocating today that multiculturalism should take precedence over these ancient tribes’ self-determination. In fact, nations go to great lengths to respect hidden peoples’ sovereignty. Every once in a while, some “outsider” is killed after getting too close to one of these groups, yet no punitive measures are undertaken in response. Authorities in Brazil, Bolivia, India, and Indonesia use such incidents as stark warnings to keep misguided visitors away.
For decades, proponents of globalism have torn down national borders, mocked the moral tenets of certain religions, and dismissed the concerns of communities that would rather maintain their own traditional values. Many of the same international institutions that protect Amazonian tribes from outside contact are outright hostile to the special cultures that bind citizens of unique nation-states. The European Union imposes its values upon Hungarian, Polish, and Italian natives. In many parts of the West, prosecutors target Christians who work to save unborn children from abortion procedures. When Democrats control the federal government, they relocate huge numbers of foreign migrants into small towns throughout the United States. Government agents do not attempt to understand local beliefs, and they certainly do not ask permission from local residents before upending their lives. “Outsiders” who see themselves as wise and all-knowing marginalize anyone who gets in their way.
Kind of makes you wonder whether one of Klaus Schwab’s regal successors in the World Economic Forum’s expanding technocratic dynasty will decree a few centuries from now that some small tribe in Kansas, Missouri, or Tennessee should be protected from outside influence in an effort to safeguard the otherwise lost knowledge of Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, Shakespeare, Locke, or Jefferson. Maybe Christians will continue to be persecuted and killed around the world until some future do-gooding globalist convinces the aristocrats at the United Nations that a small tribe of Christ’s followers should be “allowed” to continue practicing their “exotic” faith. Perhaps Western civilization must first be demolished before cynical globalists take an anthropological interest in its numerous achievements. Maybe adventurous explorers a half-millennium from now will hike to the outskirts of American “free zones” where the natives are rumored to have original ideas, write new books, and question A.I.-generated beliefs. Perhaps those free peoples will have the good sense to raise their weapons and chase colonizing globalists far away.
Language is a sneaky beast. It allows us to categorize every detail we see, yet it reduces the infinitude of our observations to mere words. Phrases can be beautiful or ugly. Sentences can quicken heartbeats or steal breaths. Speeches can move listeners to their feet or reduce them to tears. The duality of language — its capacity to unleash great and terrible things — makes it both a blessing and a curse.
Globalism is a secular religion that specializes in the manipulation of language. It does not seek to explain the world truthfully, but rather to condition people to believe whatever its ecumenical priests need them to believe. It does not persuade, but conquers. It oppresses. And because its allegiance is not to truth, but to power, it revels in inconsistency.
The globalists have lectured us about the contradictory threats of “global cooling” and “global warming” for half a century — never humbled by their false predictions but always certain that new regulations and taxes are the answer. The globalists told us that the Soviet Union’s empire was bad and that national self-determination was good; now they tell us that the European Union’s empire is good and that national self-determination is bad. The globalists argued that WWII was necessary to preserve Western civilization and defend Europe from foreign invaders; now they argue that Western civilization should be destroyed and that native Europeans should be replaced with foreigners. When we started fighting wars on “terror” decades ago, all our enemies were overseas; now globalists insist that homegrown “terrorists” are the real “threat.” Globalists told us that the U.S.-backed ousting of Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych in 2014 was not a violent insurrection against a legitimately elected government but rather a “Revolution of Dignity.” Those same globalists told us that unarmed Americans protesting election fraud at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, were part of an “insurrection” attempting to “overthrow” the federal government!
Globalism is not a coherent worldview. It is the malleable sludge of incompatible priorities that change from one decade to the next — depending upon where the most power can be accrued and where the most money can be made. Its chief quality is hypocrisy. It stands for no greater principle than the preservation and enrichment of its most ardent defenders.
Globalism is a religion of buzzwords. It claims to protect free speech — so long as that speech is free of “mis-,” “mal-,” or “dis-information.” It claims to protect public debate and political dissent — so long as citizens say nothing that globalists deem “hateful.” It claims to protect freedom of thought and freedom of religion — so long as those thoughts and prayers aren’t too “extreme.” It claims to protect women — so long as delusional men wearing lipstick are considered “women,” too. It claims to protect democracy — so long as “democracy” is understood as the permanent E.U., U.K., and U.S. bureaucracies doing whatever they want with total disregard for the will of the voters they purportedly “serve.”
Globalists are excellent at defending “freedom” because they have simply redefined the word to mean, “the public’s right to do exactly what government agents demand.” What Western globalists learned from WWII is straightforward: if you want to expand the power of government and reduce the people to timid serfs, fighting a war is unnecessary and expensive. It is much cheaper just to relabel totalitarianism as “democracy.” With the right buzzword and enough propagandists in the press, globalists can con the people into demanding their own oppression. As I said, language is a sneaky beast!
It certainly is ironic that the same “woke” globalists who love to denounce imperialism are busy turning towns, states, and entire nations into obedient colonies. Globalist conquistadors arrive under the guise of peace. They offer paper fiat currencies in exchange for real gold. They promise military protection so long as citizens hand over weapons for self-defense. They encourage local populations to take down their national flags and replace them with “gay pride,” NATO, Ukraine, or “Black Lives Matter” flags instead. They send out “climate change” missionaries to evangelize those who don’t yet fear “fossil fuels.”
Our surviving indigenous friends learned an important lesson: when globalists arrive, toss their glass beads, burn their ships, run away, and never look back. Perhaps we should follow their example.
As John wrote yesterday evening, Harvard declared that it would not "surrender its independence" after the Trump administration demanded significant changes in policies relating to the anti-Semitic intimidation campaigns on its campus. Hours later, they received good news ...
Harvard University said Monday it would resist the Trump administration’s demands to change its governance structure over campus antisemitism concerns, saying the government is overstepping its authority.
Hours later the government announced a $2.26 billion freeze of Harvard’s multiyear grants and contracts.
Do they teach FAFO at Harvard? It might become a necessary field of study in this administration.
This is a curious kind of "independence" that Harvard claims to defend. If Harvard had been independent in the first place, the federal government wouldn't have any say over its operations. By receiving federal grant money for research, student loans to subsidize its tuition, and other federal monies, Harvard has essentially accepted federal oversight in how the school operates. This is not a new concept; every administration has used the threat of suspension of federal funding to enforce its interpretation of federal laws and regulations in campus policies, especially Titles Vi, VII, and IX.
One of the most significant flexes of that authority came from Barack Obama, whose administration used the threat to force schools to reduce or eliminate due-process protections in cases of alleged sexual harassment and assault. Schools set up kangaroo courts and railroaded accused students in a manner befitting the Salem witch trials for years. Trump reversed those demands in his first term only to have Joe Biden re-impose them, along with federal demands on pronoun usage. And this is apart from the usual federal "suggestions" on curricula, credentialing, and other aspects of policy in Academia, including especially the requirement to hire administrators by the boatload for compliance.
Obama applauded Harvard’s decision with a post on X. He labeled the Trump administration’s proposal as “unlawful” and an “attempt to stifle academic freedom.”
“Harvard has set an example for other higher-ed institutions – rejecting an unlawful and ham-handed attempt to stifle academic freedom, while taking concrete steps to make sure all students at Harvard can benefit from an environment of intellectual inquiry, rigorous debate and mutual respect,” Obama said. “Let’s hope other institutions follow suit.”
Obama’s words echo the sentiments of Harvard University and its lawyers.
Obama did more to stifle freedom on campuses than any other president in modern history, both academic and in terms of liberty. He did so using the very same mechanism that Trump is using now -- access to the federal trough. Trump's response to Harvard applies to Obama as well:
The Trump administration said Monday that the school’s response “reinforces the troubling entitlement mindset that is endemic in our nation’s most prestigious universities and colleges—that federal investment does not come with the responsibility to uphold civil rights laws.”
Indeed. Harvard isn't arguing for independence; it's arguing to maintain its umbilical cord to the Treasury to subsidize its operations without federal oversight. If Harvard really wants independence, Hillsdale College has a suggestion:
At some point, a federal judge will order Trump to restore funding, and this case will wend its way to the Supreme Court, which will likely quash the order. Harvard is not entitled to federal funding if it refuses to comply with the administration's interpretations of civil-rights laws. However, it would be far cleaner for the administration and the Republicans in Congress to put an end to all federal funding for higher education, as I argued in October 2023 in my essay, "Decolonize Academia Now!" The federal government has no constitutional authority to subsidize colleges and universities, and the 60-year experiment in doing so has transformed Academia into an indoctrination center for the Left, corrupted education to the core, and created disastrous follow-on effects in primary and secondary education.
Put all colleges and universities on the Hillsdale plan. Let them survive with true pricing signals, and enforce civil-rights laws through the Department of Justice in a sane and rational manner. That will not just end the problems, but will cleanly eliminate the entitlement mentality currently gripping Academia.
Remember back when equal treatment under the law was really a thing in the United States?
We've all seen the coverage of the Karmelo Anthony affair. Anthony was, according to what we know of the case, in a place he shouldn't have been. When confronted, he pulled a knife and stabbed another young man in the chest, killing him. Then he fled. Now Anthony faces trial, and is claiming self-defense. He's been released on a reduced bond, and his family is cashing in big with a GiveSendGo fundraiser. His family has since moved into a big, expensive house in a gated community.
Who said crime doesn't pay?
This can't help but draw comparisons to the case of Kyle Rittenhouse, who really did act in self-defense, who fired to protect himself from several attackers, and who was also put on trial - and acquitted. Yet the left derides him, accusing him of being a racist, a fascist, a right-wing terrorist - anything but what he is, a young man who found himself under attack and reacted the only way he could.
No, Kyle, I can't help this make sense. It doesn't make sense. Not to any decent person, not to any civilized person, not to anyone who understands the principle of equal treatment under the law, a founding principle of our republic. But to the left, it makes sense. Here's why:
You were present in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in opposition to rioters and looters, who were terrorizing that community following the police shooting of Jacob Blake. The four days of rioting resulted in as much as $50 million in damage to private property, in addition to $2 million in city property. Several businesses were burned to the ground. But those riots, like the George Floyd riots and the rest of the 2020 "Summer of Love" riots, were sanctioned by the left. This was during the supposed COVID-19 lockdowns, but the marches, the riots, the actual insurrection in which a portion of a major American city was seized and controlled by armed thugs, were excused by the left.
Karmelo Anthony was, for reasons we don't know, in the shelter of a sports team he didn't belong to. He had no business in that shelter. A young man, Austin Metcalf, confronted him. Anthony stabbed Metcalf in the chest. Anthony fled, and Metcalf died in his brother's arms. Now, he's claiming self-defense, and the same legacy media that condemned you is strangely silent.
No, Kyle, I can't help this make sense. It doesn't make sense. It will never make sense. Not to us. Not to people who understand equal treatment under the law. Not to people who understand basic fairness.
We can hope that in this case, as in Kyle Rittenhouse's case, justice will at last be done. But it won't bring back Austin Metcalf. It won't retract all the money Karmelo Anthony's family raked in by cashing in on the event. It won't take back their big, new house in a gated community. And it will never make Austin Metcalf's family whole again.
I'm sorry, Kyle. I wish I could help. But none of this makes any sense, and it never will.
That Space Force colonel in command in Greenland – well, formerly in command in Greenland – who ran her fool mouth to undermine her commander-in-chief demonstrates an all-too-common problem with today’s senior military officers. We keep seeing these passive-aggressive, and not so passively aggressive, officers acting out and throwing childish tantrums of resistance to the President that the people of the United States elected. It’s inconceivable to those of us from the military who won the Cold War; we stayed the hell out of politics. Somehow, they must have missed that civilian control block of instruction; non-partisanship is a vital principle of our officer corps. To be political on duty is a violation of our oaths. It’s a violation of our ethos as officers. And it’s got to be brutally crushed – even Barack Obama understood that when he properly canned General Stanley McChrystal for having a staff that thought it was okay to diss the President to reporters (incredibly, after this massive leadership failure, McChrystal has gone on to sell his leadership insights to eager civilian suckers, but that’s another story).
We simply cannot have a functioning military that tolerates individuals putting their own personal prerogatives ahead of the mission – and that’s exactly what this political posturing is. It brings to mind a story of my continuing dispute with my command sergeant major when I commanded a cavalry squadron. We rarely disagreed on anything; my CSM was that guy whose picture is scowling back at you, judging you, when you look up the definition of a noncommissioned officer. But every chow time in the field, we had a confrontation. One of us would note that the last of the soldiers had eaten, and then the argument would begin.
“Sir, time for you to grab chow.”
“After you, Sergeant Major.”
“After you, Colonel.”
It was the same dispute, every meal. Both of us wanted to eat last. That’s because leaders eat last. That’s because leaders put themselves after their troops. It was a point of pride.
Now, I led this way not because I was some super-duper, awesome exceptional officer. Every senior leader I knew did this, or at least every senior leader who lasted – there’s always a tail-end of the Bell Curve. If I were seen as putting myself before my soldiers or my mission, my peers would have done me in, never mind my commanders. We all understood our role. I was trained by real leaders, so doing something different never occurred to me. It’s not about you. Putting your politics first is a betrayal.That’s what babbling about politics to undermine your bosses’ boss is.
The fact that you are a senior leader, even when you are in a command position, does not make you the main character; save that for the personal psychodrama that is your life. Call it “servant leadership” or just plain leadership, but you never leverage the authority you’ve been entrusted with to pose, posture, or pontificate. That’s because your rank doesn’t belong to you. I get to use the honorific “Colonel” because I retired at that rank, but the silver eagle I wore never belonged to me. It was on loan. You Americans issued that rank to me so that I could do a job for the United States of America. It wasn’t mine. It wasn’t about me. It was never about me. And it’s incomprehensible to me and my generation of Soldiers (and Sailors, Marines, Airmen, Coast Guardsmen, and whatever the hell they’re calling Space Force people now) that many of today’s generation of senior leaders doesn’t seem to understand that basic concept.
Your politics don’t matter when you are a military leader. At all. Politics have no place in the military. None. I was becoming more and more prominent politically and in the media as a civilian while I was becoming a senior field grade officer as a reservist, but I was actively apolitical around the troops. I never talked about politics on duty. I never asked about it or told anyone about it. You know the command sergeant major I mentioned? I have no idea who he voted for. None. That’s because he was a consummate professional, and I tried to be the same. When we put on the uniform, we did our job whether the President was named Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush again, or Obama.
But apparently, some officers these days think there is a Trump Exception to their duty as officers to be apolitical, just as there appears to be a Trump Exception to every other rule, regulation, norm, and standard in our society and government. They are wrong, and their utterly bass ackwards conception of their duties as leaders is poisonous to the organization. If you aren’t loyal to the commander-in-chief, who are you loyal to? Your own personal conception of right and wrong? Well, Soldier, you are in the wrong career field. There are a wide range of jobs you can do where you can freely share your thoughts about our political leadership and its policies, but being a military leader is not one of them.
What’s stunning is the sheer cheesiness of their tiresome acts of resistance. The commander of Fort Igloo decided to throw away her career by mass emailing a cloying letter that emphasized how she didn’t support the political leadership’s initiatives re: Greenland. What was she thinking? Another officer at NATO headquarters refused to post pictures of the new commander-in-chief and vice-president, as is a rule on military installations. That’s almost too petty to believe (I initially did not believe it – too insane – but my sources tell me it’s true).
Sadly, some retired officers have supported this. Some are clowns, like perennial election loser Amy McGrath who embarrassed herself even more than usual by supporting this despicable lack of support of the civilian chain of command. But our expectations were always low for mediocrities like her; it’s very disappointing to see a legit Vietnam and Desert Storm war hero weigh in on the wrong side. General Barry McCaffrey tweeted, “A responsible Air Force commander. True to her oath of office.” This is heartbreaking, but the elderly McCaffrey, 82, is a solid Democrat and Clinton appointee whose X timeline betrays his full-blown Trump Derangement Syndrome. Still, that does not excuse his selective toleration this revolt against the chain of command. One X commentor put it best: “Come on, general. If I was commanding a tank company in the 24th, you came by and expressed concerns, and then I told my troops ‘the concerns expressed by Desert 6 are not concerns held by this HQ’ that would just be all good in your book?” Of course not. Move over, Nagasaki – the 24th Infantry Division (Mechanized) commander in Desert Storm would have nuked that disloyal subordinate until she glowed – and been right to do it.
Not surprisingly, in light of the poor example of present and past leaders, other officers have gotten the idea that this is acceptable behavior. Some blast out emails essentially telling their subordinates to wait out the administration until they can return to the failed policies of the Democrats. And too many take to social media accounts that disclose their status as officers or NCOs to share their disapproval of the political leadership and hint – or outright state – that they will undermine their superiors’ orders.
At what point did someone give them the false impression that this was okay? Were they taught somewhere that the world was breathlessly awaiting their thoughts on American policy? Where did they get the idea that they have any right to interfere with the agenda of their elected leadership? Did it arise from toxic command climates where this behavior was tolerated or even modeled? Maybe it was taught in the military academies, which have become hotbeds of progressive indoctrination. Don’t get me started on the war colleges, where they don’t spend a lot of time studying war and instead focus on sanding the rough edges off rising-star colonels with classes about nonsense like DEI and seminars on how the weather is America’s greatest strategic threat, all so that these future generals don’t offend the civilians they meet while participating in the sacred ritual that is the “interagency process.”
There is, of course, a quick and effective means of setting the standard – or, in this case, resetting it. And Pete Hegseth is doing it. When you find someone who is failing to meet his or her obligations as a senior officer, you fire him or her. You do it immediately, like the SecDef did here. You don’t dither. You don’t equivocate. You don’t wait a couple of months until the brigadier general you detailed to perform an Army Regulation 15–6 investigation completes it. You fire the offender on the spot. And you consider firing his or her boss for allowing that kind of command climate to fester.
You also ensure that the relieved officer is retired at the rank where he or she last served satisfactorily, as opposed to the rank he or she wore when fired. Here’s a pro-tip: You didn’t serve satisfactorily if you were relieved for cause. And, where appropriate, you use the Uniform Code of Military Justice to prosecute those senior officers who violate the law and publicly embarrass the officer corps through their gross lack of professionalism. If you can bust a private for mislaying his M4, you can charge a colonel or general who breaches the most basic rules that govern our military organizations.
This is serious stuff. A military where officers feel free to undermine their chain of command is not a military; it’s a cluster fark. And a dangerous one – it doesn’t take a genius to know where it leads when military officer start thinking they know better than their civilian bosses. And we saw what happened when military discipline broke down and the chunky Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff literally called our greatest strategic opponent – Hint: Our greatest strategic opponent is not climate change – and told the ChiComs he would collaborate with them should his President give him orders he didn’t deign to approve of. But for a pardon, that over-medaled hack would be converting large rocks into small ones at Fort Leavenworth.
It’s not outside the realm of possibility that I might be called back on active duty as a retiree for a short time to help out with rebuilding my beloved military – clearly, the situation is desperate. But if I do, during the time I’m wearing the uniform, you won’t hear a damn thing from me here or on X about what I think about politics.
We need a military that can win wars again. That will not happen until we first defeat the senior leaders who put their politics ahead of their duty.
Republicans claim they are slashing government, but they’re about to explode the budget deficit to extend President Donald Trump’s tax cuts — which would balloon interest payments on the national debt, already one of the largest expenses in the federal budget. That’s no way to slash the size of government.
They could offset the lost revenue from tax cuts by reducing spending and entitlements, but that would require hard political choices. Instead, Senate Republicans are attempting to resort to budget gimmicks. Pretending the 2017 tax cuts were always going to be extended makes it look like the current proposal has no cost.
That’s pure political cowardice. There is an alternative to this mess.
The U.S. tax code is broken. That’s mainly because it collects revenue in an arbitrary, distortionary, and unfair manner. At the heart of the problem are “tax expenditures”: credits, deductions, and loopholes that benefit the government’s favorite groups and behaviors.
These provisions make the tax code more complicated, less neutral, and less growth-oriented than it ought to be. Worse, they shift the burden onto the unfavored groups, requiring higher rates to make up for revenue lost to carveouts.
This isn’t just a matter of accounting or administrative complexity; it’s a matter of morals. As the late economist David Bradford observed, our tax code reflects no coherent philosophy.
It’s a patchwork of exceptions and preferences designed more by lobbyists than by public servants. Policymakers claim they are encouraging savings, promoting fairness, or aiding the poor. In reality, many tax expenditures — also known as tax breaks — serve no purpose beyond enriching powerful interest groups.
The solution is to return to first principles. We must begin by defining the tax base in a principled way. What should count as income? What should be taxed, and when? Only then can we properly distinguish between legitimate exemptions and unjustifiable giveaways.
Most tax expenditures exist because our tax base is treated like a hybrid mess. Officially, the U.S. runs an income tax. But it includes some consumption tax elements, such as tax-deferred retirement accounts and exclusions for unrealized capital gains, to minimize the penalty to saving and investment imposed by the use of an income tax base.
My preferred path is to adopt a flat consumption tax, like the one proposed by Robert Hall and Alvin Rabushka. Under this system, income is taxed only once — at the point when it’s spent — and saving is not penalized. There are no deductions for mortgage interest, no special credits for electric vehicles, and no carveouts for employer-provided insurance.
The only major remaining tax expenditure would be a generous personal allowance to exempt essential consumption — because everyone needs to buy the basics of life, and this carveout protects those with the least income from paying a wildly disproportionate tax. The result is a simple, transparent tax system with broad fairness and powerful pro-growth incentives. Retain what’s justified. Eliminate the rest.
Short of that, we can still make immediate progress by fixing flaws in the current system. This calls for evaluating each expenditure based on clear principles: Does a provision prevent or enable double taxation? Does it ensure tax neutrality? Or does it reward politically connected industries?
Some provisions should be retained, including lower tax rates on capital gains and dividends, and exclusions for life insurance payouts funded with after-tax income. These are not handouts; they correct distortions created by the income tax itself.
Most other tax expenditures fail this test. The mortgage interest deduction benefits the wealthy while inflating housing prices. The charitable deduction, though noble in purpose, favors wealthy donors and introduces needless complexity. Energy tax credits, corporate loopholes and state and local tax deductions distort investment and transfer wealth upward rather than outward.
These should be repealed or replaced with something better. For instance, rather than specifically subsidizing corporate research and development through tax credits, we should allow full expensing of all capital investments. This would encourage innovation across the economy without picking winners and leaving others behind.
To illustrate all of this, my colleague Jack Salmon and I produced a website that categorizes America’s 170-plus tax expenditures. There are those we would keep, those we would eliminate, and those that may be too politically hard to eliminate, for which we offer reform ideas.
You’d be stunned by how much revenue can be found to offset Trump’s tax cuts and other popular spending programs. For instance, as the Cato Institute’s Adam Michel has noted, ending just two Inflation Reduction Act tax breaks — the production tax credit and the investment tax credit, both given to special interests with low return on investment — could pay for all of the best tax cuts.
Reforming the tax code won’t be easy. Every deduction has a constituency, and every loophole a defender. But the benefits are enormous: lower tax rates overall, greater economic growth and a more principled, transparent system. Better yet, it could help level the playing field between workers and investors, large corporations and small businesses, and renters and homeowners.
In the end, the tax code should reflect the values of a free society. We deserve equal treatment under the law, minimal distortion of our choices, and taxation that is clear, comprehensible, and just.
Veronique de Rugy is the George Gibbs Chair in Political Economy and a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. To find out more about Veronique de Rugy and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.
