Foreign Affairs Did Britain’s Chancellor Lie About Her Monster Budget? Quibbles about rhetoric distract from the radicalism of the tax and welfare hikes. UK Special Coverage (Photo by Henry NICHOLLS / AFP via Getty Images) British politicians rarely lie. Even Boris Johnson’s notorious claim on the red Brexit bus in 2016 that Britain sends £350 million a week to the European Union was not actually a lie. That was the official level of Britain’s contribution to the Brussels budget. What the advert didn’t say was that around half comes back in the form of rebates and investment subsidies. So this week, when the Tory leader Kemi Badenoch and most of the UK media accused Chancellor Rachel Reeves of “lying” about the state of the UK’s deficit in order to justify tax rises, I did not add my voice to the clamour. In fact, she had done something almost as bad. She used sleight of hand to push through yet another increase in Britain’s already unsustainable welfare bill. Reeves was doing what all politicians do, which is being economical with the truth. When she delivered her dire warnings about the “black hole” in public finances in an alarmist early morning address to UK voters just weeks before budget day, she did not inform them that the independent budgetary watchdog, the Office for Budget Responsibility, had radically downgraded its expectations of the gap. She did not, in fact, have to increase taxes by £26 billion in order to reassure the bond markets that the UK finances were sound. The notional deficit had actually turned into a nominal surplus of about £4 billion as a result of better-than-expected tax returns. But Reeves kept talking about black holes to divert attention from what was in fact “a Budget for Benefits Street,” as Badenoch put it—a reckless gamble with the nation’s future. Britain is already drowning in a sea of welfare, the cost of which is set to rise to over £300 billion, nearly a quarter of the UK budget. Spending on health and disability benefits alone could reach £100 billion by 2029. Almost a million young people are not in work or training. Britain’s bewildering array of benefits can, for those who know how to work the system, deliver a very comfortable living without having to work. The left-leaning Centre for Social Justice has revealed that “benefits pay £2,500 more than wages of a full-time job after tax.” This is clearly insane. Yet when Reeves entered government in 2024 she promised to cut the Tory “welfare bill” and said that the government would be “laser-focused” on increasing Britain’s moribund growth rate. Reeves also promised not to increase taxes on working people. In the event, she has increased taxes on working people (and pensioners) by a total of £66 billion across two budgets. Again: Did she lie? Technically no, since she defined “taxes on working people” narrowly as referring to income tax rates, National Insurance payments, and value added tax (sales tax). These she has not actually increased. Instead, she increased taxes on businesses and froze income tax thresholds on workers, meaning that a million more Brits on modest incomes of £50,000 (about $67,000) find themselves paying tax at 42%, including 2 percent National Insurance. If they have a student loan you can add 9 percent, meaning a marginal tax rate of 51 percent. This is the so-called “stealth tax” approach to public finance. But it isn’t so stealthy anymore; taxpayers are waking up to the reality of high-tax/high-welfare Britain. A majority believe Reeves has broken her manifesto pledge. Perhaps voters would’ve cut the Chancellor a little slack if they’d thought that these tax hikes would improve the state of public services or help grow the economy. But they know, and she knows, they won’t—at least not so anyone would notice. The OBR forecast is that UK GDP will essentially flatline for the next five years at just over 1 percent if lucky, while the benefits bill grows by at least £80 billion. The Labour Party government may say they want economic growth, but many Labour MPs think “growth” should be measured by growth in spending on public services, ignoring the inconvenient truth that it is the taxes of private-sector workers—82 percent of the UK workforce—that pay the salaries and pensions of well-heeled public-sector workers. Almost the first thing Reeves did on entering government was award Labour’s paymasters, the public sector unions, by handing out above-inflation pay rises to those treasured public-sector workers. NHS junior doctors got a 22 percent increase in pay last year. They have expressed their gratitude by ordering a new wave of strike action over this Christmas season, despite warnings of the risk to patient care. The most controversial welfare hand-out in Reeves’s budget was the lifting of the two-child cap on Universal Credit payments. The Conservative government had ruled years ago that people living on benefits should not be able to have large families paid for by the taxes of working families who could not afford to have more than two children themselves. Labour said that the Tories had plunged more than 300,000 children into poverty. They hadn’t, of course: it was arguably the decisions by welfare families themselves, since the policy was first announced in 2015. No one forced them to have three or more kids. But Labour MPs cheered to the rafters when she announced that the two-child benefit cap was to be lifted. What Reeves didn’t say was that this move will also reward many Muslim families who tend to have larger families. Some Labour MPs in multiracial urban constituencies rely for their majorities on the votes of ethnic minorities and people on benefits. But did she lie about this? No. She just never talked about it, knowing that anyone who did talk about the ethnic dimension will be labelled a racist. This Labour government is testing the UK economy to destruction. Can a society survive on welfare instead of work? We’re about to find out. And that’s no lie. The post Did Britain’s Chancellor Lie About Her Monster Budget? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics Let’s Bet on Pete Hegseth’s Professional Future I’m putting my money where my mouth is. The real problem with non-election years is that there’s nothing to bet on besides the boring old standbys of sportsbook and horseracing. But the political realities of the Golden Age of America may be about to change that. Pete Hegseth is a survivor. The secretary of defense has managed to hang in there for 10 months, despite the turbulence: “Signalgate,” which claimed Mike Waltz’s job as national security advisor; a circular firing squad among his aids at the Pentagon, which earned him some very interesting profiles in POLITICO and New York magazine; a military parade that was just sort of a let-down for everyone involved, both those who said it would be cool and patriotic and those who said it would be terrifying and fascistic. This is impressive in a morally neutral way. Better men have already been driven to madness and unemployment by this administration’s hijinks. There’s a certain type of brute will to hold on that you can’t help but admire. This boat business is beginning to be a stinker, though. As part of our open-ended excursion in the Caribbean that definitely isn’t aimed at regime-change in Caracas, we’ve been blowing up go-fast boats that are alleged to be involved in drug trafficking—an allegation that is credible enough at the statistical level, albeit not for the fentanyl the administration is back to telling us is coming out of Venezuela. (How many fans and supporters of the ’80s-retro administration know that this is mostly disrupting the coke supply?) The problem is that it’s all been sort of half-cocked at the pesky particular level. In October, we blew up a boat and then repatriated the survivors—not exactly the usual practice if these are the fearsome terrorists the admin is insisting they are. And now, by Washington Post reporting and (basically) the admission of the administration, it looks like in September, instead of repatriating the survivors of one of our missile strikes, we blew them up to finish the job. Prima facie, this looks pretty bad. You’re not supposed to blow up the helpless survivors of a military engagement; that’s considered pretty naughty behavior. (Comparisons to how we deal with pirates, the old legal category of the hostis humani generis, are specious; pirates, if disarmed and captured in an engagement, still got due process, even if an extremely abbreviated form of it.) People have trotted out terms like “war crimes,” which is pretty stiff stuff if “war crimes” is a category you believe exists; others have stuck with tried-and-true, down-from-the-Mountain stuff: “murder.” The administration is acting pretty spooked; Hegseth, Admiral Frank Bradley, and other participants as yet unrevealed to the viewers at home are hopping on the blame carousel. For his part, Hegseth has alleged that he “didn’t stick around” for the second boat strike, and so can’t be held responsible for whatever he said that might have been construed as an order to attack disarmed survivors; he has also said the decision, while totally, indubitably, 100 percent correct, was nevertheless made in the “fog of war.” All right then. Hegseth’s Pentagon has been a persistent clown show from the get-go, and now it is wandering onto the marshy ground of straightforward illegality and/or war atrocities. It is proven that the administration’s appetite for abject self-embarrassment isn’t limitless (cf. Waltz). So, in my official capacity as managing editor of The American Conservative, I am inaugurating the first-ever and probably only Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth Professional Death Pool.  Rules: Only subscribers are eligible. Send me by email the date that you think it will be announced Hegseth will depart, what date you think will be Hegseth’s last day at the Department of Defense, and answers to two tie-breaker bonus questions: Will Hegseth resign or be fired? Will Hegseth get another administration job? (Finding my email on the site is the main barrier to entry. I will email a confirmation back to you after I’ve determined you’re actually a subscriber.) At time of publication, there are 1140 days left to the Trump administration; your date will be converted to a number from 1 to 1140. The score will be calculated by the following scheme: |DAYOFANNOUNCEMENT – YOURANNOUNCEDATE| + |DAYOFDEPARTURE – YOURDEPARTDATE|  = SCORE. A perfect score is 0. I will personally cover a year’s subscription for the winner or winners of this professional death pool. Ties will be determined by tie-breaker questions; post-breaker ties will be honored in full. (For fun, my bet is that Slippery Pete announces February 1, 2026, and leaves March 1—that is to say, Days 57 and 85.) It is my theory that reality can get very stupid, but perhaps not indefinitely stupid. The inaugural (and final?) Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth Professional Death Pool is a fun, edifying way to quantify just how stupid it can get. At least it’s something to do between now and midterms. The post Let’s Bet on Pete Hegseth’s Professional Future appeared first on The American Conservative.

Why We’re Talking About Angel Studios This Christmas Christmas is here, and every year it’s the same battle: you want something heartwarming to watch together as a family, but mainstream “holiday movies” keep sneaking in crude jokes, casual blasphemy, and agendas you never signed up for. Remember ‘Dear Santa’? We reviewed it here and gave it a hard 35/100 for turning Satan into a wisecracking buddy who drops f-bombs, mocks God, and treats dead children as punchlines. It’s marketed to families, yet leaves parents diving for the remote. No thanks. That’s precisely why Angel Studios exists. All December long, they’re dropping new episodes, movies, and specials that are genuinely safe, genuinely entertaining, and genuinely uplifting—no hidden surprises, no apologies required. Some are unquestionable Christmas classics, others are just rock-solid family viewing perfect for the long school break and dark winter nights. Here’s everything coming this month on Angel. Grab the app (or head to Angel.com), browse the free titles, or join the Angel Guild for the full library and extra perks. Your couch is about to become a much happier place. Series to Keep the Whole Family Coming Back Homestead The Series (Angel Original) The intense post-apocalyptic survival story continues. New episodes every week, culminating with Episode 8 on Christmas Day.     The Wingfeather Saga Season 3 (Animated) Epic, beautiful fantasy with faith and courage at its core. New episodes every Wednesday.     Tuttle Twins (Seasons 1-3 streaming free) Time-traveling twins learn real economics and liberty. New Season 4 episode drops Dec. 2.     The Wayfinders (New Angel Original) Teens pulled into a magical realm—think Narnia vibes with swords and prophecy. New episodes Wednesdays starting Dec. 16.   Iggy and Mr. Kirk Season 2 (with Kirk Cameron) Adorable life lessons for the little ones. First ten episodes drop Dec. 3 and 10.     Jungle Kids Season 1 Real missionary kids living wild adventures while following Jesus. Drops Dec. 3.     Movies & Specials Perfect for Christmas Nights Truth & Treason (Dec. 2, 2025) – Powerful WWII resistance story from inside Nazi Germany         Hazel’s Heart (Dec. 18) – True survival tale of faith and family in a deadly blizzard         The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey, The Christmas Candle, Saint Nick of Bethlehem (all Dec. 4) – Classic, heartfelt Christmas stories that keep Christ in Christmas         The Christmas King! (Dec. 11) – Wild, fun animated Christmas adventure from Butch Hartman         Summer Snow and Faith, Hope & Love (Dec. 11) – Uplifting family dramas about healing and second chances         Against the Sun (Dec. 18) – Incredible true WWII survival at sea         The Mighty Macs (Dec. 30) – Underdog basketball triumph with heart         Bonus: Clean Comedy Every Friday Dry Bar Comedy specials drop every “Funny Friday” in December—hilarious stand-up the entire family can actually enjoy together. There you have it: a full month of movies and shows that respect your family, your faith, and the real reason for the season. No fast-forward moments, no awkward conversations afterward—just good stories that leave everyone better than they started. Download the Angel app today and make this Christmas the year your family movie nights feel like they’re supposed to. Which one are you watching first? Let us know in the comments.The post December Angel Studios Roundup: Family-Friendly Options In Time For Christmas first appeared on Worth it or Woke.

Voice for the ages. The post The Marvin Gaye album his producer called his greatest leap: “He really began to perfect that” first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

America Did Not Owe the Afghan National Who Murdered Sarah Beckstrom Resettlement in the United States

Crooks, Disguised As 'Protectors,' Are Still on the Loose

Supreme Court Should Not Let Climate Lawfare Set US Energy Policy

Fear and Ideological Conformity Cannot Win on College Campuses

Time for a Midterm Contract With America