The Justice Department has sent a letter to tech billionaire Elon Musk's America PAC warning that his $1 million sweepstakes giveaway to registered voters in swing states may violate federal law, a source familiar with the matter confirmed to ABC News Wednesday. The letter from the Election Crimes Branch of the DOJ's Public Integrity Section was sent to Musk's PAC in recent days, the source said.

A new Microsoft report found that Russia and China are ramping up efforts to interfere in the U.S. election. Russian operatives are reportedly using artificial intelligence-generated deepfake videos to target Vice President Kamala Harris, portraying her in a negative light, according to an analysis released Wednesday by the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center.

The launching pad for the entire 1990s movement. The post “Sounds like it was recorded yesterday”: The one band Billie Joe Armstrong considered timeless first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

You’re aware that Steve Jobs’ widow, a crazed leftist named Lauren Powell Jobs, is the owner of the Atlantic, are you not? Mrs. Jobs, a San Francisco Democrat and multi-million-dollar donor to both Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris, props up that venerable rag as a vanity project so that the market can’t kill it as it so desperately wants to. Nobody reads the Atlantic anymore, other than perhaps a few unhinged leftists like its owner. Which is not to say that the Atlantic is altogether irrelevant as it should be. Here and there, all the worst, most salacious, obviously untrue, and hardcore partisan attacks on Republicans that other “mainstream” media organs pass on will tend to appear there. And that has happened again, which we’ll get to in a minute. The Atlantic is fronted by a hack named Jeffrey Goldberg, a former police beat reporter for the Washington Post who worked his way into his current job by sucking up to powerful Democrats like Barack Obama. Which doesn’t make Goldberg remarkable. What does make him remarkable is the lengths he will go to in order to trash Republicans, and Donald Trump in particular. In 2020, Goldberg ran a garbage article that accused Trump of cancelling a 2018 visit to a cemetery in France where American World War I soldiers are buried, and Trump supposedly said, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” This is according to the Atlantic, which used an unnamed source for the article. No less than 19 people from Trump’s staff went on the record to refute Goldberg’s smear, and that should have resulted in some staff changes atop the Atlantic. Did that happen? Of course not. Instead, PBS, funded by your tax dollars, gave him their Washington Week show, which is now branded with the Atlantic as an “editorial partner.” We’re $36 trillion in debt, so maybe there’s no more money for PBS. Ask Mrs. Jobs if she’d like to buy that shop as well; we probably wouldn’t notice an ideological difference in the editorial stance. Anyway, Goldberg is at it again. The Atlantic is now running with another smear of Trump, this one starring the disgruntled former White House chief of staff, John Kelly, perhaps the most disappointing high official of the U.S. government since Benedict Arnold. Kelly, a former Marine general who left Trump’s employ after a tenure filled with rancor and questionable loyalty, has been trashing the former president ever since. Kelly “confirmed” Goldberg’s “suckers and losers” smear last year, for example, though he was not in the room when those offending statements were supposedly made. For the most part, nobody really listens to John Kelly anymore. But in the five and a half years since leaving the White House, Kelly had never made this accusation until now: Retired Gen. John Kelly, who served as White House chief of staff in the Trump administration, said former President Trump praised Adolf Hitler’s generals for their loyalty in a new interview in The Atlantic on Tuesday. In the interview with editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, Kelly affirmed reporting from Peter Baker and Susan Glasser’s book, “The Divider: Trump in the White House,” which quoted Trump asking Kelly, his chief of staff at the time, “Why can’t you be like the German generals?” According to Goldberg’s account of Baker and Glasser’s reporting, Kelly responded by explaining to Trump that the German generals “tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off,” but Trump reportedly was not swayed by the correction. As October Surprises go, this isn’t much of a bombshell. Swamp disloyalty to Trump is hardly news; we’ve seen so many attacks made on him by Washington usual-suspects who spent time in his administration only to become ruling-elite parrots that it’s essentially a joke at this point. It’s an even bigger joke that this came from Goldberg, which is a dead giveaway of its quality or lack thereof. There is no journalist at any senior level of US corporate media who lies more frequently, casually, and shamelessly than @JeffreyGoldberg. He's been doing it non-stop for 20 years. And @TheAtlantic, which he edits, is owned by Kamala mega-donor Laurene Powell Jobs: https://t.co/9KmDNctPVC — Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) October 22, 2024 Kelly even wrote a book about his time working for Trump and never even mentioned this supposed bombshell. Isn’t that interesting? Is Kelly’s memory as bad as Joe Biden’s, and that’s why he didn’t include Trump’s alleged affinity for Nazi generals? Or did he just not think it was a big enough deal to talk about it until Jeffrey Goldberg came begging for more Trump dirt? And it isn’t really all that hard to imagine Donald Trump, who wasn’t even on speaking terms with Kelly by the end of 2018, when he was dispatched and Mick Mulvaney was brought in as the acting chief of staff, getting exasperated enough with Kelly that he’d cast about for an example of loyalty and wonder where his Erwin Rommel might be. Who cares? This idiot cares: And of course another idiot had to jump on the Atlantic’s bandwagon, only to get slapped down by somebody else with a much different view of John Kelly’s credibility. Vice President Harris is a fraud. I was in the White House at a senior level much longer than General Kelly. He is complicit in this fraud and has lied to the American people. His lies, as well as John Bolton's, are a disservice to Nation at this critical time. So are the VP's. https://t.co/2b77pMsVVl — Keith Kellogg (@generalkellogg) October 23, 2024 The “suckers and losers” smear just had a lot more form and flair to it, if not much more substance. But it gets even worse at the Atlantic, because Kelly’s sudden uncovering of long-repressed Trump memories was hardly the most egregious new smear Goldberg dragged out. I’ll let Ace of Spades put this one together for you: The claim is that Trump offered to pay for the funeral of a Mexican-American servicemember killed by Biden’s incompetence, and then, for some reason, when no one could hear him (except the well-placed Mystery Source), he said “I’m not paying $60,000 to bury a Mexican, don’t pay that bill.” Or words to that effect. I’m not going to bother getting the “quote” right because it’s fictional in the first place. It’s like arguing about whether Darth Vader said “Luke, I am your father” or “No, I am your father.” It doesn’t matter. It’s not real. (Though, as far as the correct fictional quote, it’s the latter one. That made-up fictional quote is more important than this one.) The sister and family and attorney of the dead servicemember say it’s a lie and are telling the Marxist Insurrection Media to stop lying and using the dead woman as a prop. And check out the lame “community note” added by a Kamala Harris partisan — well, there’s no proof he did pay for the funeral. I think the sister would mention it if he didn’t. Don’t you? The sister of the dead serviceman was less than impressed with Jeffrey Goldberg, indeed… Wow. I don’t appreciate how you are exploiting my sister’s death for politics- hurtful & disrespectful to the important changes she made for service members. President Donald Trump did nothing but show respect to my family & Vanessa. In fact, I voted for President Trump today. https://t.co/o8cDrKOKBV — Mayra Guillen (@mguilen_) October 22, 2024 Natalie Khawam, the attorney for the family, dropped a thermobaric bomb on Goldberg over the “don’t bury the Mexican” smear: After having dealt with hundreds of reporters in my legal career, this is unfortunately the first time I have to go on record and call out Jeffrey Goldberg@the Atlantic: not only did he misrepresent our conversation but he outright LIED in HIS sensational story. More importantly, he used and exploited my clients, and Vanessa Guillen’s murder… for cheap political gain. I would like to also point out that the timing of this “story” is quite suspicious, as this supposed conversation that Trump had would have occurred over 4 years ago! Why a story about it now?! As everyone knows, not only did Trump support our military, he also invited my clients to the Oval Office and supported the I Am Vanessa Guillen bill too. I’m grateful we were successful in getting bipartisan support of the I Am Vanessa Guillen Act, and because of everyone’s hard work and efforts our service members now have more protections and rights while serving our country. And the former White House chief of communications also weighed in. Here’s what he had to say: On the left: I sent Atlantic a comment saying President Trump “absolutely did not say that,” referring to the alleged comments about Ms. Guillen they printed. On the right: Atlantic translated that comment to “didn’t hear Trump say it.” Treat this dishonest piece accordingly. pic.twitter.com/pM1o1c9fEm — Ben Williamson (@_WilliamsonBen) October 22, 2024 The Democrat Propaganda Press, also known as the legacy corporate media, didn’t take Ben Williamson’s advice. Instead, they blew up this Atlantic smear early this week in hopes of resuscitating the flagging Kamala Harris campaign. But there is no particular evidence that anybody cares anymore. Why should they? We already know these people are in the tank for Harris and her party and that they give not a fig about their own credibility. To watch Jen Rubin, the unhinged psychotic once trotted out as a “conservative” pundit by the Washington Post, screeching about why this isn’t the killer app of the 2024 race is both delicious schadenfreude and highly instructive to where we are in America. Probably because most folks see this is a desperate tactic being played by the scum of the earth in a panicked effort to retain power, Jen. There’s that old quote attributed to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn that applies in this case to the Propaganda Press as well as the regime it serves… “We know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know they are lying, we also know that they know we know they are lying too, they of course know that we certainly know they know we know they are lying too as well, but they are still lying. In our country, the lie has become not just moral category, but the pillar industry of this country.” What might be different in modern-day America compared to the Soviet Union of Solzhenitsyn’s time is that we still have the individual power to resist the lie in this country. That and the media mob willing to join claws with Goldberg to spread his smears are simply nowhere near as competent at propaganda as the Soviets were. Nice try, fellas. READ MORE: The Brilliant McDonald Trump Trump, McDonald’s, and the Lost Art of Noblesse Oblige Kamala Harris Flunked the Job Interviews The post Right on Schedule, the <i>Atlantic</i> Scum of the Earth Weigh in on Trump appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

If President Donald Trump prevails on Nov. 5, the Left’s long march through the institutions grinds to a halt. Ever the optimist, I am prepared to speculate that, after an initial period of disorder, the halt will be more enduring than most now believe possible. The future will be known in two weeks. If Kamala Harris prevails on Nov. 5, in Rao’s words, “This page of history remains unturned.” Two items of interest have prompted this speculation. The first is a powerful book I am reviewing by esteemed scientist and survivor of China’s Cultural Revolution, Jilong Rao. Titled Déjà Vu: Confronting the Cultural Distortion Caused by Communism, Rao’s memoir documents the outspoken Rao’s life as a “pariah” before, during, and after the Cultural Revolution. The second is a tweet directed at me while I was reviewing Rao’s book. In said tweet, a fellow named Corey Cullington critiqued an unnamed podcast I had done on the subject of my book, Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6. It reads as follows: I’m listening to the podcast you appeared on a few weeks back. You misstate the timeline multiple times throughout the interview. Wrong about the time CS gas was deployed (1:21pm, not 1:06pm). Wrong about the first time “He’s got a gun!” was yelled at the Speaker’s Lobby (not “a split second”). On his X page, Cullington suggests he is affiliated with an entity known as the “Sedition Hunters.” These junior G-men describe themselves as “a global community of open-source intelligence investigators (OSINT) working together to assist the U.S. FBI and Washington D.C. Capitol Police in finding people who allegedly committed crimes in the January 6 capitol riots.” As an added bonus, they “are able to identify other crimes and pass that information along to law enforcement officers.” Rao has seen it all before. In China, sedition hunters of various stripes kept independent-minded souls like himself in a constant state of anxiety. The public face of the Sedition Hunters is a German–American living in Switzerland named Forrest Rogers. On a Jan. 5, 2022, episode of NPR’s Morning Edition, Rogers bragged about how he and his comrades had sifted through social media sites identifying J6ers, among them a Pennsylvania mother of eight who helped break a window at the Capitol. “They sent that information to the FBI,” said the approving host, “and [Rachel] Powell was arrested a few weeks later.” Powell, whom I profile in Ashli, is serving four and a half years in a federal prison. Of the eight living women I cover, all of whom have been incarcerated, Powell is the only one who committed something resembling a crime. I tweeted Cullington back: The greatest mass injustice against American citizens since Japanese internment, two women killed, one [beaten] while dying, other women beaten bloody, a fake cop-killing sold to the media, and you’re quibbling about my timeline? I guess it’s cool now to be a narc, oh, excuse me, “Sedition Hunter.” If I thought that the betrayal of one’s fellow citizens for thought crimes, real or imagined, represented something of an end stage in America’s cultural revolution, Cullington proved me wrong. The end stage was his quibble. I double-checked: my timeline was correct. The 15-minute differential didn’t matter in any case. What mattered was that the Capitol Police lobbed munitions into the midst of a peaceful crowd, turning a protest into a riot, a riot that Cullington’s powerful allies alchemized into the political gold of an “insurrection.” This word was used to justify the prosecution of some 1,500 protestors, 90 percent of whom did nothing worse than take selfies in the Capitol Rotunda. Aware of this massive injustice, Cullington attacked my timeline, further evidence, if more were needed, that liberalism is dead. None of this surprised Rao. “The J6 Committee established political forbidden areas to cover up the truth of the 2020 election fraud,” he wrote. “[T]hey jailed people who questioned the integrity of the election and peacefully expressed their opinions.” He had not only seen oppression before, but he had also experienced it. As a student, the CCP assigned him hard labor in the coal mines for asking an impertinent question. America has not reached the coal mine phase quite yet, but for the past four years, the Left has had us on a fast track. The cultural revolution, American style, launched years earlier but accelerated in the late 1980s. With the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the fall of the Soviet Union, America’s Marxist–Leninist groups had to find a new mission. The hard Left saw not “the end of history” but rather a new beginning. Much as the Comintern shifted in the 1930s from revolution to the more popular “anti-fascism,” our homegrown Marxists shifted from a worker’s revolution to the always popular anti-racism. From anti-racism, the Left quickly expanded its protection racket to other “marginalized” groups — gays, Muslims, women, other “people of color,” and, in time, the transgendered. In my 1991 book of essays, Snake Handling in Mid-America, I documented my first real encounter with America’s nascent Red Guard. While visiting a friend, I happened to say something favorable about a movie starring black comedian Eddie Murphy. My host’s daughter, a student at the uber-liberal University of Wisconsin, shot me a withering look and informed me that Murphy, a known “homophobe,” was not to be praised in her presence. In the way of explanation, my host clarified that Murphy was not considered “politically correct”— the first time I had heard that phrase. I assumed political correctness to be a phase that one’s children’s outgrew. I assumed wrong. The radical young did not mature. They metastasized. In 2020, leftists let their inner fascist out, first with the COVID lockdowns, then with the George Floyd uprisings, and finally with the open suppression of speech after a corrupt election. In January 2021, they cooperated with federal authorities to sell a largely peaceful protest as a rebellion against the state, our very own Tiananmen Square. “These people who have stolen power,” writes Rao, “obviously want to hide something and do whatever it takes. This is the J6 effect.” As Rao observes, China has not moved beyond the government’s bloody suppression of dissent at Tiananmen Square 35 years ago. “Those who died on June 4 cannot rest in peace,” he writes. “The peaceful path of gradual political reform within the PRC has been completely blocked; the historical opportunity for the rejuvenation of Chinese civilization has been destroyed.” The United States is not China. We have been protesting “abuses and usurpations” literally since day 1. We have been inspired in our protest by a divine spark, and that fire still burns. Although the jury is still out on America’s future, I remain hopeful. In my 2015 book, Scarlet Letters: The Ever-Increasing Intolerance of the Cult of Liberalism, I highlighted the efforts of those Americans who successfully resisted media cancel culture. A common denominator among them was a strong faith in God. The Robertsons of Duck Dynasty fame, for instance, knew what they were fighting for. “Almost uniquely among those who were assigned a scarlet letter,” I wrote of family patriarch Phil, “Robertson understood the nature of the religious war being waged. The struggle was not between left and right in any political sense. It was a struggle between the politically correct and the ‘biblically correct,’ between the ‘new man’ of the progressive imagination and the ‘new creation’ in Christ” that Robertson had become.” The Left: Heroes or Losers? The future will be known in two weeks. If Kamala Harris prevails on Nov. 5, in Rao’s words, “This page of history remains unturned.” The Left, he adds, might succeed in “extinguishing the beacon of freedom.” In this craven new world, citizens will remember Liz Cheney as a patriot, the Sedition Hunters as heroes, and Jan. 6 as Sept. 11. If Trump prevails, we turn a page on history. We uncover the truth of Jan. 6 and remember that day not the way the Chinese do Tiananmen Square but the way the French do the Bastille.  If so, our success will be due in large part to the recognition by an unexpected alliance of high-powered influencers that Phil Robertson was right: the battle is a spiritual one. In finding or rediscovering their faith, these people — Russell Brand, Tucker Carlson, Jordan Peterson, Naomi Wolf, even, in his own way, Elon Musk — have come to appreciate the wisdom of America’s founders: freedom is God’s gift to man, and not even a Mao can take that away. “You’ll never hear me say I’m on God’s side or God’s with me, or even I’m with God,” said Tucker Carlson in concluding his speech at the Republican National Convention. “I want to be; not sure I am. But I will say this, unequivocally and conclusively, God is among us right now. And I think that’s enough. God bless you.” READ MORE from Jack Cashill: Jack Smith Shamelessly Withholds Evidence The Atlantic’s Hanna Rosin Brings Woke Gospel to MAGA Country Jack Cashill’s Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6 is now available in all formats.   The post Why the Left’s Long March Might End on Nov. 5 appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

What should serious conservatives do about the election? Donald Trump is certainly not George Washington or Ronald Reagan; but they are not on the ballot. What about for Kamala Harris? Her main selling point is that Trump is a threat to democracy — even though her party has a long-standing history of questioning elections. Watch her in the edited 60 Minutes interview. What is she saying? Her woke record and her many changes of opinion complicate an evaluation. But come on. Like Joe Biden who promised before his election to bring America together, she will quickly revert to her real ideology, which made her the “second-most liberal U.S. senator,” or she will just do what she is told. We certainly know about her — but what about Trump? It is reasonable to question a man introduced to the political world as a threat to national security. But as Wall Street Journal columnist Holman W. Jenkins Jr. has made clear, it is simply empirically true that the intelligence agencies, bureaucrats, and media have been biased active disinformation opponents to Trump from the beginning and still are today. Even Washington Post media editor and active anti-Trumper Ruth Marcus had to concede that the one Trump legal conviction was based on a “creative interpretation” of the law. Jan. 6 undoubtedly was inspired by Trump and his fiery rhetoric, but felony prosecutions for merely inspiring it are wholly unjustified. The issue is what kind of president Trump would make. To determine this, there is a four-year record with which to evaluate him. On domestic policy, Trump transformed the judiciary and especially the Supreme Court with conservative appointees, reforming one whole branch of the tripartite national government and influencing state and local courts in the process. Roe v. Wade was repealed and sent back to the states, advancing federalism and tailoring solutions to different constituencies. On economic policy, Trump cut taxes, including on businesses, making them more competitive, which extended economic prosperity. COVID did disrupt the economy and became a bureaucratic mess but was saved by federalizing the major decisions to the states. Regulations were reduced, broadly and substantially. Obamacare remained but the individual mandate and the medical device tax were repealed. Tariffs were too numerous but not especially costly. There was support for homeschooling and school choice and major reform at the Department of Education. It may be a somewhat mixed domestic record, but it clearly had a strong conservative orientation. On foreign policy and immigration, a former George W. Bush senior White House staffer published a very revealing interview assessing Trump. Marc Thiessen, now at the Washington Post, has been a supporter of an active foreign policy — and has even been somewhat sympathetic to what a fellow former Bush White House staffer labeled Bush’s “unpopular wars.” But Thiessen’s interview comes to the surprising conclusion that: [A]ny fair examination of Trump’s first-term record shows that he is no isolationist. This is a president who destroyed the Islamic State’s caliphate, bombed Syria (twice) for using chemical weapons on its own people, killed Iranian terrorist mastermind Qasem Soleimani, launched a cyberattack on Russia, approved an attack that killed hundreds of Russian Wagner Group mercenaries, armed Ukraine with Javelin missiles, and warned he would unleash “fire and fury like the world has never seen” if North Korea continued to threaten the United States. He reported that Trump told him: “[I]f he were in office, Russia would never have invaded Ukraine and Iran would never have attacked Israel.” In support, Thiessen noted that “Trump is the only president in the 21st century on whose watch Putin did not invade his neighbors.” Trump added that Putin did not get aggressive about Ukraine until after Biden’s “disastrous handling of the U.S. withdrawal” from Afghanistan. Similarly, Trump claimed that China will not attack Taiwan while he is president. But he was not optimistic about the future since Taiwan spends 2.6 percent of GNP on defense even though, given its distance from U.S. help, it needs to spend 10 percent. On immigration, Thiessen was impressed that while Trump is often overaggressive in speeches on illegal immigration, he is an enthusiastic supporter of legal immigration. Thiessen reported that Trump has “an entrepreneurial view of immigration” that is “true to his roots,” given that his father was born to German immigrant parents and his mother immigrated from Scotland. Trump considered them wonderful parents, and supported the fact that his mother properly came to the U.S. to work. Thiessen noted that this was a difficult matter for Trump to discuss since many of his supporters would disagree. Even so, Trump recently publicly supported permanent residency for foreign graduates of American colleges. Going beyond the rhetoric, Thiessen suggests the real Trump’s strategy to maintain peace is not to retreat from the world, but to make our enemies retreat. Trump employs escalation dominance, using both private and public channels to signal to our adversaries that he is ready to jump high up the escalation ladder in a single bound — daring them to do that same — while simultaneously offering them a way down the ladder through negotiation. In fact, during his presidency, Thiessen wrote, “Trump killed Soleimani and then warned Iran’s leaders that he had picked out 52 targets inside Iran in honor of the 52 hostages they took in 1979. He added that if Iran retaliated, he would hit them.” Beyond Thiessen, a recent letter from national security professionals and Gold Star parents who support Trump was signed by former Attorney Generals Edwin Meese and William Barr, former Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher C. Miller, former Secretary of State Michael Pompeo, former National Security Adviser Robert C. O’Brien, former Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke, former Energy Secretary Rick Perry, former Directors of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe and Richard A. Grenell, former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, and former President of the World Bank Group David Malpass — followed by several hundred other former government experts who mostly worked for him. The Thiessen article described it, and the broad support from his former top officials seems to confirm it but, as a former top personnel officer for Ronald Reagan, I was surprised when I read former Attorney General Bill Barr’s earlier book and observed an open-minded President Trump. Without Barr emphasizing it, I came to realize how often he went to Trump and was successful in convincing him to override earlier decisions made in his name by his own White House staff. Reading Interior Secretary David Bernhardt’s’ bio of his service likewise demonstrated to me how he also had open access and success in overturning supposed White House decisions. No recent president has provided such immediate access to themselves for their advisers to question such decisions. It may be true, as was argued in a Wall Street Journal editorial, that as president, Trump showed “no resistance to the $2 trillion Covid blowout” on spending and “didn’t build the military as much as he claims.” That same editorial likewise found him to have been weak on trade (without comparison to Reagan’s 1984 tariffs). Moreover, it complained that his “successes on judges, tax reform and deregulation were based on conventional ideas that were teed up for him” by conventional conservatives. But isn’t such a reliance what we want from a president? Can a conservative consider a candidate a danger to the country with this four-year record as president? The fact is, even if belatedly, he did turn over the government to his successor. Yes, he made mistakes and he is often maddeningly off-putting. Though there are legitimate concerns that he may have changed, the Theissen interview and the endorsements are encouraging. Read the Robert Caro biographies of Lyndon B. Johnson and ask yourself: What is the public standard to be president? Or consider Richard Nixon and, actually, quite a few recent others. Reagans and Washingtons are rare. And even they had flaws. So, the only rational conclusion is that the consequence of sitting it out and waiting for some Platonic ideal is a Harris presidency; and that is just too much to ask of any conservative. Donald Devine is a senior scholar at the Fund for American Studies in Washington, D.C. He served as President Ronald Reagan’s civil service director during his first term in office. A former professor, he is the author of 11 books, including his most recent, The Enduring Tension: Capitalism and the Moral Order, and Ronald Reagan’s Enduring Principles, and is a frequent contributor to The American Spectator. The post What Are Serious Conservatives to Do About the Presidential Election? appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

The two bitterly opposed presidential candidates, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, have tacitly agreed on how to deal with our most pressing domestic policy problem — ignore it. The federal government last fiscal year spent $1.7 trillion more than it received in revenues — $5 billion a day. While both candidates have touted an abundance of new spending plans, and even some tax hikes (higher tariffs by Trump, big corporate and individual income tax increases by Harris), neither has uttered a memorable word about the need, much less a plan, for eliminating massive budget deficits.  So what? Huge public indebtedness usually leads to economic weakness and decline. The Romans learned this in the early centuries of the Christian era. More recently, once rapidly growing nations like Argentina are shadows of their former selves because of profligate spending financed by printing or borrowing money. From the 1960s through the 1980s, Americans feared Japanese industrial prowess would threaten America’s economic supremacy. But Japan soon began massive deficit borrowing, creating a national debt relative to national output more than double that of the U.S. It created three “Lost Decades” of economic stagnation, eroding Japanese economic power, prestige, and living standards. Other things being equal, bigger budget deficits mean lower economic growth. In the United States in the 1960s, federal deficits typically were small — less than 1 percent of GDP — with the national debt actually declining in relation to the nation’s growing output. The median annual growth rate in real GDP exceeded 4.5 percent. By the 1990s, annual deficit financing was growing considerably, typically over 2.5 percent of GDP and, not surprisingly, annual economic growth had slowed to a median 3.3 percent. (READ MORE: Budget and Debt Scenarios: Politicians Should Care) Fast forward to the first half of this decade. Despite general prosperity and low unemployment (other than the COVID pandemic), deficits have soared to usually around 6 percent of GDP. Output growth has further deteriorated, with median annual real GDP growth for the five years ending this December probably around 2.5 percent. Borrowing to pay one’s bills generally has negative consequences for nations — just as it does for individuals. Before 1930, we had an unwritten fiscal policy that effectively prohibited borrowing except during wartime emergencies. Until 1930, 96 of the first 140 federal budgets ended in surplus. By contrast, in the 2024 fiscal year, the nation had its 23rd consecutive year of deficits. My profession of economics deserves much of the blame for this rise in deficit spending — John Maynard Keynes and his disciples argued that government spending, financed by borrowing, could stimulate aggregate demand and reduce unemployment. That has helped created an environment for politicians where it is typically far riskier politically to finance new spending with taxes and other revenues than with borrowing. Deficit financing thus has become a superb incumbent protection device. The political gains associated with greater government spending exceed the political losses associated with budget deficits that Keynesian economists claim have relatively benign economic effects. What to do? We restrict drunks from driving, and hormone-charged teenage boys from entering girl’s locker rooms, so why can’t we also curb Congress? Why not emulate the 49 states that have constitutional prohibitions, with limited exceptions, on deficit spending?  To be sure, our Founders did a great job with our Constitution, appropriately making it difficult to amend. There have been only 27 amendments ratified since the Bill of Rights was enacted 233 years ago — the last became effective in 1992. Under Article Five, there are two ways to propose amendments to the Constitution: one through the states and the other through Congress. In the 1980s and 1990s, several attempts at a federal balanced budget amendment achieved near success using both amendment approaches. They ultimately failed. The need for one has since grown substantially, though paradoxically national interest in such an amendment has declined dramatically.  However, any attempt to constrain government spending will be fiercely opposed by progressives, and likely many creative stratagems would be employed to circumvent any new constitutional limits imposed on federal expenditure. But the consequences of high deficits are severe — more even than a slowing of economic growth and the lowering of living standards for future generations of Americans. For example, without new budget constraints, the American dollar will likely lose its primacy among world currencies as our credit rating declines. (READ MORE: After the US Credit Downgrade, Let’s Talk About a Radical Budget Change) Perhaps it will take a prestigious, relatively nonpartisan federal commission of mostly nonpoliticians to devise a balanced budget amendment to present to Congress and the states for approval. The time has come to put our fiscal house in order.  Richard Vedder is Distinguished Professor emeritus at Ohio University and Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute. READ MORE from Richard Vedder: Are We at the Beginning of the End of Homo Sapiens? Some Colleges Still Using Race in Admissions Lies Abound In Higher Education. Now They’ve Lost Our Respect. The post Time to Put Our Fiscal House in Order appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

by Natalie Winters, The National Pulse: A federal judge has ordered former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani to hand over a significant amount of personal property to be placed in receivership. The judge has given Giuliani seven days to comply. The order includes the former mayor’s Manhattan penthouse apartment, along with several luxury items and jewelry. The receivership determination comes as […]

We mine it today at 1:7… and then… well it becomes HISTORICALLY embarrassing. #Gold #SilverSqueeze pic.twitter.com/8AaT3IwPDX — Make Gold Great Again (@MakeGoldGreat) October 23, 2024

Election Emergency! Desperate Democrats Are Using The Same 2020 Playbook In An Attempt To Steal The Election AGAIN As Maricopa County Announces It Will Take 13 Days To Decide Election! Must-Watch/Share Alex Jones Broadcast! https://t.co/k3eNZMLtUM — Alex Jones (@RealAlexJones) October 23, 2024