Author name: Donald Fitzpatrick

tax

76% of Your Income Taxes Are Now Going Towards Interest on The National Debt

When it comes to the money the government is siphoning off you through income taxes, most of it is literally going up in smoke.

The most recent Treasury data showed that as the federal government surpasses a record $35 trillion national debt, $1.1 trillion will be spent on interest payments alone this fiscal year. 

According to reports: Interest payments on the federal debt now account for 76% of all personal income taxes collected. This means that for every dollar Americans pay in income tax, about 76 cents go towards paying interest on the national debt.

Roughly 45%, or nearly half of the federal government’s revenue is from personal income taxes. 

The “76%” statistic is from the latest data from June, which showed that the U.S. government spent $140 billion on interest for Treasury debt securities and collected $185 billion in individual income taxes the same month.

At the turn of 21st century, the national government debt was $5.77 trillion, and by 2010 it had more than doubled to $12.77 trillion. The debt reached $23.22 trillion at the beginning of 2020. And only a few years later on Biden’s watch, it now surpasses $35 trillion.

At this rate, we’ll eventually reach a point where we don’t even bring in enough income tax to cover the interest payments on the debt – also known as bankruptcy.

In the last fiscal year of the Trump presidency, annual interest on the debt were at $521 billion, which was $44 billion (15%) higher than the $454 billion the government was spending the year before he took office. By contrast the government’s annual interest expense under Biden increased by a whopping $619 billion from what he inherited, a 114% increase. 

Phrased differently: Biden screwed up America’s finances so badly that the federal government’s annual interest expense under Trump was closer to zero than it is to Biden’s.

Economics

FLASHBACK: Paul Krugman Debunks Paul Krugman

This one is a bit dated, as I just stumbled upon it – but it’s still amusing. 

Back in 2020, the economics Nobel laureate Paul Krugman penned a New York Times column in which he seemingly revealed that he doesn’t remember his own convictions.

“When Joe Biden is inaugurated, he will immediately be confronted with an unprecedented challenge… he’ll be the first modern US president trying to govern in the face of an opposition that refuses to accept his legitimacy. And no, Democrats never said Donald Trump was illegitimate, just that he was incompetent and dangerous” Krugman wrote.

There are countless examples one could point to as a rebuttal. The most obvious would be Hillary Clinton, who had called Trump an “illegitimate president” as recently as the past September (and it was a tune she’d been singing since immediately after the 2020 election). Former Clinton campaign adviser (and now Biden OMB pick) Neera Tanden took to twitter to spread conspiracies about Russian hacking in the aftermath of the 2016 election.

A week before Trump was sworn into office, the late John Lewis announced his boycott of the inauguration, adding “I don’t see this President-elect as a legitimate president.” Meanwhile, Rep. Jerry Nadler told CNN that while Trump was “legally elected,” non-existent Russian interference made his election “illegitimate.”

And there are plenty of other notable Democrats I could quote, but perhaps the most notable is Paul Krugman himself, who penned an article on December 12th of 2016 titled “The Tainted Election.” 

In it he Krugman: “So this was a tainted election. It was not, as far as we can tell, stolen in the sense that votes were counted wrong, and the result won’t be overturned. But the result was nonetheless illegitimate in important ways; the victor was rejected by the public, and won the Electoral College only thanks to foreign intervention and grotesquely inappropriate, partisan behavior on the part of domestic law enforcement… nothing that happened on Election Day or is happening now is normal. Democratic norms have been and continue to be violated, and anyone who refuses to acknowledge this reality is, in effect, complicit in the degradation of our republic. This president will have a lot of legal authority, which must be respected. But beyond that, nothing: he doesn’t deserve deference, he doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt.

While Paul Krugman isn’t good at debunking much of anything, he was at least able to debunk Paul Krugman.

National Affairs, Woke

Kamala Harris Campaign Manager Admits She Can’t Win

A top campaign manager to Kamala Harris admitted that he doesn’t think she’ll win, and that she has no accomplishments.

Compliance Manager for the Democratic National Committee and the Kamala Harris campaign, Joyce DeCerce, was caught on a hidden camera by the O’Keefe Media Group admitting as much. 

“I don’t think Kamala Harris would win this year,” said DeCerce, who also wants us to know he uses he/him pronouns. “She doesn’t have any accomplishments to speak of.”

“She’s weirdly unpopular” DeCerce said, while clarifying that he likes Harris. But despite that, he doesn’t think Harris can beat Trump. “I don’t think Kamala Harris would win this year,” he said. But of course, DeCerce blames that on “a bunch of racist, sexist, bulls***,” as bigotry is the monocausal explanation for all criticism of the left according to them. 

He also admitted in his most damning comments that their campaign strategy for donors is to “take their money and tell them what they want to hear,” and “putting on a little show” for them.

Check it out for yourself:

Naturally, the response was brutal.

And it turns out, someone tried to intimidate the O’Keefe Media journalist who extracted this from Joyce. 

As is evident, that didn’t work out too well for them.

crime

Liberals Say This State Has the “Craziest” Gun Laws – It’s Also the Safest State

Does progressive Vermont have the nation’s craziest gun laws? That’s certainly what liberals outside of the state seem to think.

The state’s better-known Senator, Bernie Sanders, found himself under fire from his fellow candidates during the 2016 Democrat primary for the crime of having “only” a D- rating from the NRA. In particular, Sanders found himself defending a completely rational vote of his: when in 2005 he voted in favor of legislation granting gun manufacturers legal immunity from being sued by gun victims (just like how we don’t hold General Motors liable for car fatalities).

Despite being one of the most liberal states, if not the most liberal, Vermont surprisingly has a gun culture. 

Then-Democrat primary rival Hillary Clinton specifically attacked Vermont’s lax gun laws (in an attempt at attacking Sanders) as fueling gun problems in other states, but she never went into the specifics of Vermont’s gun laws—or gun crime in the state. Among the criticisms Vermont has received from anti-gun groups includes:

  • In 2009, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence said that Vermont’s gun laws are the “worst in the nation,” which “lead to the illegal trade of firearms” and that they “put children at risk.”
  • The Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence gives Vermont an “F” on its gun control scorecard.
  • Vermont gets a few honorable mentions in a Washington Post article on the “6 Craziest State Gun Laws,” which reports that you can conceal and carry a firearm at age sixteen in the state without a license. The state also has no minimum age to own a rifle or shotgun.
  • The Trace (a website started with funding by “Every Town for Gun Safety”) chided Vermont as a “gun rights paradise,” quoting one gun-rights activist as saying that “Vermont, for over 220 years, has never had permits, has never had registration, and has never had any serious gun control laws.”

Vermont sounds like a scene out of Mad Max when described by the anti-gun lobby, but the state’s residents would probably laugh at the characterization. Vermont was the safest state in the nation in 2016, 2017, and 2018, second safest in 2019 and 2020, and the safest in 2021, 2022 and 2023

The pattern here is clear – and especially surprising considering how crime-plagued any place run by leftists usually are. 

Gun violence in particular is almost non-existent. According to the Vermont Department of Health, they had only seven gun homicides a year every year from 2011 to 2014. In 2015 the state had twelve, but that fell back to seven in 2016. In a state of 620,000, that’s a rate of 1.12 firearm homicides per 100,000 people in a typical year.

The FBI statistics report only two gun homicides in Vermont in 2012, for a firearm homicide rate of 0.3 per 100,000.

For comparison, the 2021-2022 FBI crime statistics report a gun homicide rate of 66.7 per 100,000 people for St. Louis. The stats for other cities per 100,000 are 61.3 for Birmingham, 49.3 for Portsmouth, 44 for Detroit, 42.4 for Memphis, 37,7 for Milwaukee – and the list goes on. All have among the strongest gun control laws in the nation. 

Some liberals have tried to counter reality by pointing out that Vermont’s gun homicide has risen as of late by a massive percent – but it’s a massive percent of a microscopic number. As per the Associated Press

Overall the country had a 6% decrease in national firearms homicides between 2021 and 2022, but Vermont saw a 185% jump, according to Vermont State Police Capt. Shawn Loan.

“So we went from seven firearms deaths in 2021 to 20 in 2022,” he said, adding that he did not have the current total for this year.

It says a lot when you can have a 185% jump in gun homicides – and still have the fewest gun homicides per-capita in the entire country. 

It’s no wonder liberals are quick to criticize Vermont’s gun laws—but never seem to talk about Vermont’s gun violence.

crime

USA Today Columnist Somehow Unsure If There’s a Link Between Police and Crime Rates

In one of the most incredible attempts at questioning reality itself, USA Today’s Daniel Funke turned criminologist and tried to cast doubt on the obvious link between the “defund the police” movement and rising crime.

Funke ironically framed his ignorance as a fact check of conservatives pointing out that all of the most dangerous cities in America are run by Democrats, questioning that this is because “That is what happens when you defund the police.”

Funke acknowledges in his article that that “Between 2019 and 2020, the U.S. recorded its highest increase in the national homicide rate in modern history. And in 2021, 12 cities did break their annual homicide records,” while glossing over that it’s also true that those 12 cities have Democrat mayors. The only point that Funke refutes is that not all 12 cities defunded the police, which he then uses to justify titling his article “No evidence defunding police to blame for homicide increases.”

Yet, every single city without exception that did defund their police during the insanity of the summer of 2020 and the George Floyd riots did see an increase in crime. Funke pointing out that other Democrat run cities that were weak on crime for reasons other than defunding police does nothing to further his point.

While the homicide rate rose nearly 30% in 2020, the largest year-over-year increase since at least 1905, the gain was even more pronounced in many of the major cities that defunded police, including Portland, which saw a 530% increase in their murder rate, Austin (74% increase), New York (56%), and Chicago’s (54%). While Funke’s “fact check” is specific to police defunding, there are cities that didn’t defund the police but had their police departments crippled by so-called “progressive prosecutors,” which was another major factor in the national crime wave we’re experiencing. Many refer to these prosecutors as the “George Soros DAs” for their tendency to have taken large sums of cash from the far-left billionaire.  

Further destroying what was left of his credibility, Funke also calls into question whether police help that much at all in reducing crime.

He quotes one criminologist at the University of California-Irvine who told him that she’s not aware of any data that illustrates the effect of reducing the police on homicide rates, and that older research suggests there isn’t a definitive conclusion.

There’s a reason Funke only quoted one person’s opinion – and that’s because the fact that police reduce crime is just about the most replicated finding in the field of criminology.

To quote a brief summary of the existing literature:

  • In a 2005 paper, Jonathan Glick and Alex Tabarrok found a clever instrument to measure the effects of officer increases through the terrorism “alert levels” that were a feature of the early to mid-aughts. During high-alert periods, the Washington, DC, police force would mobilize extra officers, especially in and around the capital’s core, centered on the National Mall. Using daily crime data, they found that the level of crime decreased significantly on high-alert days, and the decrease was especially concentrated on the National Mall.
  • Stephen Mello of Princeton University assessed the Obama-era increase in federal police funding. Thanks to the stimulus bill, funding for Clinton’s Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) hiring grant program surged from about $20 million a year in the late-Bush era to $1 billion in 2009. The program design allowed Mello to assess some quasi-random variation in which cities got grants. The data shows that compared to cities that missed out, those that made the cut ended up with police staffing levels that were 3.2 percent higher and crime levels that were 3.5 percent lower. This is an important finding because not only does it show that more police officers leads to less crime, but that actual American cities are not currently policed at a level where there are diminishing returns.
  • A larger historical survey by Aaron Chalfin and Justin McCrary looked at a large set of police and crime data for midsize to large cities from 1960 to 2010 and concluded that every $1 spent on extra policing generates about $1.63 in social benefits, primarily through fewer murders.

Contrary to the sort-of “police state” rhetoric the left will often deploy, even before the “defund the police” trend, the U.S. employed 35% fewer police per-capita than the world average. In 2018 the U.S. employed 238 cops per 100,000 people, while France employed 429 per 100k, Italy 456 per 100k, Russia 515 per 100k, and Germany 388 per 100k.

We could use a heck of a lot more police – because they reduce crime.

Religion

Trump Backs Louisiana Becoming First State to Mandate Display of 10 Commandments in Public Schools

Former President Donald Trump recently led by example of what it means to be a good conservative person. Trump took to his personal social media platform, Truth Social, to support a controversial claim of religion being kept in schools. More specifically, displaying the Ten Commandments inside classrooms.

The former President has backed the debate-starting topic of placing the Ten Commandments in school classrooms and other public areas by stating that it is the “first step” in the revival of religion in America. Trump’s comments come days after Republican Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry signed a new law requiring the Ten Commandments be added into every public school classroom in the state of Louisiana. Trump praised the new law on his social media platform, stating that he loves the Commandments in both public and private schools, as well as other public places.

Former President Donald Trump told a group of evangelicals they “cannot afford to sit on the sidelines” of the 2024 election, imploring them at one point to “go and vote, Christians, please!”

 Trump also endorsed displaying the Ten Commandments in schools and elsewhere while speaking to a group of politically influential evangelical Christians in Washington on Saturday. He drew cheers as he invoked a new law signed in Louisiana this week that makes it the first state to require the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom.

“Has anyone read the ‘Thou shalt not steal’? I mean, has anybody read this incredible stuff? It’s just incredible.  They don’t want it to go up. It’s a crazy world” Trump said at the gathering of the Faith & Freedom Coalition.”

Trump, a day earlier, posted an endorsement of the new law on Truth Social, writing: “I LOVE THE TEN COMMANDMENTS IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS, PRIVATE SCHOOLS, AND MANY OTHER PLACES, FOR THAT MATTER. READ IT — HOW CAN WE, AS A NATION, GO WRONG???”

The new law signed by Governor Landry however has sparked controversy, as the topic of religion in schools itself has been highly controversial in regards to separating church and state. The American Civil Liberties Union and similar groups are planning to fight the new law in Louisiana. Governor Landry doubled down on his decision and defended his newly signed law by referencing the biblical narrative that Moses, the one that God handed the Commandments to, was the “original lawmaker”. It is possible that the fight over the law could result in a legal battle that lands in the hands of the Supreme Court, which has leaned towards the conservative side of politics in recent years due to three appointments by Trump during his time in office.

Economics

Revisiting Some of Paul Krugman’s WORST Economic Predictions

In an amusing column following Joe Biden’s spectacular loss to Donald Trump in the first presidential debate, the New York Times’ chief hack Paul Krugman called Biden the best president of his adult life…. before asking him to step aside.

Even in the face of a performance like what we saw last night, Krugman’s hyperpartisanship prevents him from truly acknowledging that there’s anything wrong with Biden. When posting his post-debate article to twitter this morning, he captioned it “I really hated writing this.”

Oh, the horrors.

Always a staunch enemy of the GOP, Paul Krugman’s partisanship predates the “Trump Derangement Syndrome” we saw sweep the media. He was seemingly never vaccinated against TDS, Romney Derangement Syndrome, McCain Derangement Syndrome, Bush Derangement Syndrome, and the list goes on, and on, and on.

If Trump does win in November, which is now a statistical favorite, Krugman’s TDS may finally reach stage four.

During his presidency, Trump had personally blasted Krugman for losing all credibility with his “false and highly inaccurate writings,” and there’s no hyperbole there.

On the theme of Krugman being betrayed by his own partisan hackery, I thought it would be fun to compile some of his worst predictions over the years.

Here are just a few.

The Stock Market is Doomed Under Trump!

When it became clear that Donald Trump would win the presidential election late into the night on November 8th, 2016, the stock futures market initially panicked, with the Dow Jones shedding over 800 points.

Before the markets even had the chance to open the following day, Krugman took to his New York Times column to predict they would never recover. “It really does now look like President Donald J. Trump, and markets are plunging. When might we expect them to recover? … If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.”

The Dow closed up 250 points the next morning – and skyrocketed thereafter.

Admittedly I’m not sure how to calculate the margin of error on the difference between “never” and “the next day.”

The Trump stock market surge continued almost entirely uninterrupted during his presidency, with the only exception being at the beginning of 2020 due to a global pandemic. But despite even that, major indexes still closed out higher in 2020.

Krugman in 2017 – There Will Be No Return to 3% Growth

Appearing on the network Bloomberg in March 2017, Krugman expressed doubt that we’d be seeing a return to 3% economic growth under the Trump administration.

He reiterated the same point later in the year on Twitter, arguing that at it would be difficult to achieve 3% growth due to baby boomers leaving the workforce.

No surprise here: he was dead wrong.

Growth was 3.1% from the fourth quarter of 2017 in the fourth quarter of 2018. Even more impressive, the economy was only projected to grow 2% according to the baseline under Obama.

A Recession is Coming!

In February of 2019 Krugman predicted that a recession is coming “this year or next.”

It’s hard to give Krugman any credit for his predictive ability, because he been predicted a Trump recession every single year of his presidency.

Krugman had also dialed back the severity of his prediction. On election night Krugman predicted that Trump would throw the entire planet’s economy into a recession. He admitted in his February prediction “By the way, my track record for this is bad—as is everybody’s. No one is good at calling these turning points.”

Anyone can be a prophet when they make the same prediction every year, and Krugman was “technically” right in that there was a recession in 2020, though no one can put the blame for the Chinese virus that caused it on Trump (though they will try). Trump then oversaw the fastest recovery from a recession of that severity in U.S. history – which Krugman did not predict.

Nothing New

It’s not just under the Trump-era that the world’s most arrogant economist has butchered his predictions.

In 1998, Krugman dismissed the rise of the internet’s popularity and its eventual economic effects: “The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’–which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants–becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”

Only four years later Krugman came up with a plan to save the economy from the technology bubble which had just went bust – create another economic bubble! “To fight this recession the Fed needs…soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. [So] Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.” And with that came the worst financial crisis since the great depression.

And that’s not all! In 2010 he predicted that we’d begin experiencing deflation – when in reality we experienced relatively low inflation. In 2008 he predicted that Europe would outperform America economically – and then the financial crisis hit, and Europe was hit far harder than the U.S. (and took much longer to recover from it). On eleven occasions between April 2010-July 2012 Krugman predicted that the Euro would collapse – which obviously never happened.

There’s a running joke in the finance community that you can make yourself a killing my simply doing the opposite of whatever Jim Cramer is advising. Perhaps the same can be said for Krugman, too!

Latest, Media, Website

Kevin Spacey Claims To Have Flown with Esptein

Shunned actor Kevin Spacey has admitted in an interview with Piers Morgan that he flew on an airplane owned by the financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. In the interview the actor tearfully discussed his financial struggles, which he claimed had been caused by mounting legal fees following multiple sexual assault allegations.

Spacey insisted that he had no relationship with Epstein, and that he did not know at the time who he was or that he was flying on one of his planes. He also denied having known Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell despite being in the same room with her, and claimed that he traveled with the Clinton Foundation.

Commentators Pat Gray and Jeff Fisher dismissed the claims in Gray’s podcast; Jeff joked that being associated with the Clintons was “not much better” and Gray called Spacey’s claim that he knew neither Epstein nor Maxwell despite traveling on a plane with them “garbage”.

Though many public figures named in the Epstein files were only distantly connected or mentioned in conversation with the financier, former President Bill Clinton is among those named in more serious allegations. As documents unsealed in January 2024 revealed, witness Sarah Ransome claimed that the sex offender had kept sex tapes of Clinton as well as Prince Andrew and Richard Branson.

Spacey prompted further controversy when he came out as gay in response to the allegations. After being blacklisted by much of Hollywood, Spacey was acquitted in 2023 of sexually assaulting four men. Despite the verdict, the actor has since admitted to Morgan that he was “too handsy” in the past. Liam Neeson, Stephen Fry and Sharon Stone are among those calling for Spacey’s return to the screen following his acquittal.

In response to the allegations, the actor was sacked from his role on the House of Cards TV series after six seasons of the show, and edited out of the movie All the Money in the World. His replacement Christopher Plummer had to reshoot his scenes at the last minute. Spacey is famous for his roles in American Beauty, LA Confidential, the Usual Suspects and Se7en. His performance in American Beauty won him an Academy Award for best actor in 2000.

Science

FDA Issues New Safety Alert for Infant Formula Due to Cronobacter Contamination

The US Food and Drug Administration has issued a new warning that three products produced for infants aged 0-12 months with a net weight of 12.4 oz have possibly been contaminated by Cronobacter. The products, which are sold in Texas and other locations across the country, are the Farmalac Baby powdered infant formula with iron, the Farmalac Baby formula with iron and low lactose and the Crecelac Infant powdered goat-milk formula.

The FDA warning alerted caregivers and parents about the potential Cronobacter contamination, and noted that the governmental body needed to issue the safety alert following new findings of potential contaminations in a product sample, despite the products being recalled by the company on May 24, 2024. The warning is being issued separately regarding the products by Dairy Manufacturers Inc. due to the company’s failure to comply with US infant formula regulations.

The limited samples did not detect the bacteria, but the company did not submit the mandatory premarket notification to prove the formula’s nutritional adequacy and safety. The firm and distributors are working together with the FDA to remove the flagged products from the market.

Cronobacter sakazakii can cause diarrhoea and fever, as well as meningitis and sepsis in more serious cases. In late December 2023, the FDA announced a recall of thousands of cans of infant formula produced by Reckitt-owned Mead Johnson Nutrition. The recall came after Cronobacter sakazakii was discovered in cans imported into Israel from the US and reported by Israeli health authorities.

In 2021 President Joe Biden’s administration announced plans to address the amount of toxic heavy metals found in baby foods. The FDA faced heavy criticism for being slow to act on limiting infants’ exposure to heavy metals. The reports from 2021 found unsafe levels of arsenic, cadmium and lead in products sold by leading baby food companies.

Cronobacter contamination of infant formula was the main reason for a dire shortage of infant formula in 2022 that resulted from an Abbott Nutrition plant ceasing production due to safety issues. Parents and caretalers are being advised to immediately contact a healthcare provider if they observe any symptoms in the event that the potentially contaminated formula has already been consumed.

Uncategorized

Tom Cotton Battles CNN’s Jake Tapper Over Trump

Republican Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton has defended former President Donald Trump’s State of the Union comments on Ukraine, noting that the country is only invaded when Democrats are in the White House. Crimea was illegally annexed by the Kremlin in 2014 during former President Barack Obama’s second term. Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 a little over a year after President Joe Biden entered the White House.

During the interview with State of the Union Host Jake Tapper, Cotton was grilled over Trump’s claims that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy never stops seeking US assistance in its war with Russia. Cotton also suggested that the military aid sent to Ukraine by the Trump administration was more effective in fending off Russian aggression in the war’s early stages than the aid supplied under Biden’s leadership.

The senator blasted Biden over the chaotic withdrawal of US armed forces from Afghanistan in 2021, arguing that this was the reason Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to “go for the jugular” in Ukraine. Cotton clarified that Trump supports Ukraine over Russia and wants victory for Ukraine, but argued that Europe needs to “do more” and “care more” about a conflict in its “backyard”.

Cotton said that the White House needed to “get tough” on America’s allies and foreign leaders who are “free-riding” on the strength of the US military. He argued that only under Trump will European leaders “finally” invest in “common sense”.

Watch the entire discussion below:


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