A virtuoso. The post The musician Jack Bruce always took for granted: “Didn’t really analyse it” first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

I hate to end the week on such a dour note. It is the holidays, after all, and it’s the time of year to pull in the horns, gather around the national fireplace, and watch the various iterations of the Hallmark Channel’s single plotline on the boob tube. Instead, I’m casting aspersions. I would rather not do that, you know. I’d rather be cheerful. But it’s hard to do that when things are so clearly askew. What am I talking about? Well… 1. “Shipwrecked Survivors” This is one of the more bizarre controversies imaginable. Our government has designated Cartel de los Soles, which is a drug cartel operated by the Venezuelan military serving as a logistics hub for the international cocaine trade, as a foreign terrorist organization, and it’s pretty well established that gives the president the power to execute military operations against that cartel’s operatives. (RELATED: We Should Declare War on the Cancerous Cartel in Caracas) Which, they’re doing, by blowing drug boats out of the water as they ferry shipments of cocaine from ports in Venezuela and Colombia to larger vessels for transport to our shores. (RELATED: Battleship Was Always a Lot of Fun) Since 1990, more than 600,000 Americans have been killed in this Opium War being prosecuted against us by the communist regime in Venezuela and its allies throughout Latin America and in China, which seems to be intensifying if anything. Sure, last week I wrote that we shouldn’t have any more legal ambiguity about whether the Navy can blow those drug boats out of the water. I think we should declare war on the Maduro regime in Venezuela and take it out as a counteroffensive in this Opium War. But you wouldn’t think that the plight of cartel drug-runners laboring for a hostile and illegitimate foreign regime is an item even rising to that level of necessity. And you’d be wrong. This week, the Left, and some of the more irritating born losers on the Right, have gone off the deep end in expressing outrage over the misfortune of the cartel thugs-turned-shark food in the Caribbean. (RELATED: ‘Don’t Give Up The Ship’? Seriously?) NEW: Congressman @jahimes (D-CT), Ranking Member of House Intel Committee, emerges from SCIF briefing w/ Admiral Bradley, says he was shown unedited video of the second strike on a narco boat in September that killed two survivors, adding: “What I saw in that room is one of the… — Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) December 4, 2025 That’s a different reaction than others had to the briefing… I want to thank Admiral Bradley and General Caine for briefing Congress on the righteous strikes against narco-terrorists. These drug cartels have been waging war against the American people for decades, and I am glad that President Trump is fighting back. — Tom Cotton (@SenTomCotton) December 4, 2025 If you think footage of drug trafficking boats getting blown out of the water is shocking, I encourage you to visit the inner city of Chicago, or Skid Row in Los Angeles and see what happens when more than 100k Americans are dying from OD every year. It’s mass murder. So no, I… pic.twitter.com/viMkAOSJ8w — Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (@RepLuna) December 4, 2025 It isn’t like we’ve got some sort of debate about what the threat here is. The propaganda press might not have been interested enough to pass it along, but there’s a smoking gun out there… Hugo “El Pollo” Carvajal Barrios is an ex-military intelligence officer for the Venezuelan government and was a powerful official within Maduro’s Cartel de los Soles. Today, he’s in U.S. custody, charged with narco-terrorism, among other things. As part of a plea deal for a lighter sentence, he’s agreed to help the U.S. government by telling it everything he knows about Maduro and the cartel. I’ve written a little about this in the past. He’s “provided information on how he collaborated with Colombian guerrillas and supervised the shipment of tons of cocaine to North America,” and in October, “during his pre-sentence hearing, his legal team admitted that Hugo Chávez and Maduro illegally used funds from PDVSA — Venezuela’s state-run oil and natural gas company — to finance other left-wing political movements in the world for at least 15 years.” But on Wednesday, the Dallas Express exclusively obtained and published a letter that El Pollo wrote to Donald Trump, and boy, is it a doozy. To sum it up, he confirms something a lot of us already knew: Venezuela’s “government” purposely and consistently targets the United States. In the letter, he explains that he fled Venezuela in 2017, knowing that he was wanted in the United States and would face charges, but he wanted to “dismantle Maduro’s criminal regime and bring freedom to my country.” “Today, I see the need to address the American people about the reality of what the Venezuelan regime truly is — and why President Trump’s policies are not only correct, but absolutely necessary to the United States’ national security,” he wrote. You should absolutely hit that PJ Media link just above the excerpt. Barrios’s letter is an atom bomb providing a casus belli for unrestricted warfare against the Maduro regime and anybody remotely connected to it. Again, I’m 1o0 percent behind the idea of taking this to Congress and getting a declaration of war. But the drug boats are no different from pirates on the high seas, and there has never been a requirement of quarter for them. And these “shipwrecked survivors” of a missile strike on that one boat were apparently caught calling in help to salvage the cocaine the strike didn’t sink. And yet you have this stupid uproar. Which is about taking out Pete Hegseth and disrupting the Department of War in the advent of kinetic operations to clean out Maduro and his thugs. It’s pretty clear at this point that this is a lot bigger than the legalese arguments over drug boats getting shot up. This is about the Democrat Party attempting to save the Maduro regime (and its Cuban, Russian, and Chinese backers), which has been in a clandestine Opium War against the United States for years. (RELATED: Putin’s Caribbean Gambit) You don’t like treason as a word to describe that? Fine. Give me another one. I’ll listen. But you’d better be convincing. And until you are, I’m calling these people traitors, bought and paid for by our enemies. 2. “Racism” and Somali Crooks Perhaps I’m remiss for not writing a full column on this massive scandal involving what looks like the bulk of the Somalis in Minneapolis claiming their kids are autistic so they can draw a “crazy check” from the federal government and then pass a chunk of the proceeds to the Al-Shabaab terror group. (RELATED: Yes, the New York Times Really Ran a Story About Social Services Fraud by Immigrants) I can explain myself. And it’s not that I’m afraid I’ll be called a racist, which is apparently why law enforcement in Minnesota was afraid to pursue these people. To the contrary, I can’t fill a whole column with my reaction to it. A sentence will do: it was a massive, stupid mistake to ever take in tens of thousands of Somalis, whose society is arguably the most backward, dysfunctional and flat-out evil of any on earth, and this scam makes that clear, and the best thing we could do about it is to start denaturalizing and deporting as many of these people as we possibly can. Why shouldn’t we be able to object to this? Why are we forced to tolerate it? WOAH ? @JamesOKeefeIII undercover footage of Former Rep Ilhan Omar coworker saying Ilhan Omar came up with paying people for votes “She’s (Ilhan Omar) the one who came up with all this (pay to vote)” Ilhan Omar campaign staffers become precinct managers AND COUNT THE VOTES… pic.twitter.com/brBOzCku6m — Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) December 4, 2025 Why do we have to tolerate this? Here’s Ilhan Omar promoting the Safari Restaurant in Minneapolis for feeding kids. The owner, who donated to her campaign, was convicted in the feeding our future $250 million fraud scheme They stole hundreds of millions of dollars from hungry children. pic.twitter.com/9vWHyP2GBA — Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) December 4, 2025 And why do we have to tolerate this? A group of 18 Republican lawmakers have signed a letter blasting Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) for allowing foreigners to illegally obtain commercial driver licenses (CDLs) under his watch and demanding the revocation of such unlawfully issued CDLs. The letter, led by Rep. Pete Stauber (R-MN), began by telling Walz that his state “has the entire nation in shock and disbelief over the record level of fraud and mismanagement of taxpayer money that has occurred under your leadership.” A recent audit by the Department of Transportation (DOT) found that a third of Minnesota’s non-domiciled CDLs — a license that non-citizens can obtain if they are authorized to work in the U.S. — were issued illegally. The state was given 30 days to come into compliance and revoke the licenses, or risk losing up to $30.4 million in federal highway funding, a Wednesday department press release stated. The letter went on to highlight Walz’s other scandals that came out before the latest CDL revelations, including a U.S. Treasury Department investigation into whether Walz and the Biden administration oversaw tax dollars being “diverted” to the Somali terrorist organization Al-Shabaab due to “feckless mismanagement.” Walz is undoubtedly a cretin of the first order, and he’s done everything he could to accelerate the damage to ordinary Minnesotans’ quality of life, not to mention the interests of American taxpayers, at the hands of the Somalis. But it’s the Somalis doing the heavy lifting here, not Walz. Walz doesn’t do much heavy lifting, despite the ridiculous tough-guy image he tries to present. Well, maybe not that tough… Tim Walz says people are driving by his house calling him ‘retarded.’ ? pic.twitter.com/tZ7VcBjDVR — Breaking911 (@Breaking911) December 4, 2025 Somehow you’re supposed to modulate your reaction to an entire community which openly endorses tribal criminality and generates results like these… Minnesota Somali population: Poverty: 58% Food Stamps: 42% Unemployed: 40% No High School Education: 41% Billions in fraud waste and abuse… pic.twitter.com/78m0FUJpTb — Dustin Grage (@GrageDustin) December 4, 2025 Kudos to Matt Walsh for taking a flamethrower to the propaganda press’s attempts to rehabilitate the Somalis… There are around 80 thousand Somalians in Minnesota. If they contribute 67 million dollars in state and local taxes, that means they each pay on average about 800 bucks or so. To put that in perspective, the average Minnesotan pays anywhere from 8 to 10 THOUSAND in state and… https://t.co/kpDwlXcbEJ — Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) December 4, 2025 3. “Racism” and Afghan Terrorists You know all about the Afghan who attacked two members of the West Virginia National Guard who were stationed in Washington, D.C. That was enough of an outrage to spark President Trump into putting a stop to importing any more Afghans. (RELATED: Trump’s Third-World Ban Misses the One Thing That Actually Matters) And of course, that’s led to a loud chorus of screaming about how unjust it is for our government to “abandon” those Afghans who “helped” us while we spent 20 years trying to turn their country into a Western democracy (a fool’s errand, to be sure). When the Corporate Joe Biden decided to pull out of Afghanistan willy-nilly, his administration flew almost 200,000 of these people with virtually no vetting into the United States, and we’re getting to pay the price for that. Did you hear about this? AFGHAN TERRORIST ARRESTED TODAY JUST MILES FROM D.C. CAME IN UNDER BIDEN. Today the heroes of @ICEgov arrested Jaan Shah Safi, an unvetted Afghan national who provided support to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria-Khorasan (ISIS-K). He also provided weapons to his father who is… pic.twitter.com/NFwiTSqVfb — Homeland Security (@DHSgov) December 3, 2025 Are you comfortable with this? ?Texas CDL Instructor Exposes Afghan Infiltration in Trucking Schools (**CORRECTED AUDIO**) This is one of the most serious issues affecting national security I’ve ever seen. Ellie, a senior CDL instructor who quit her job in 2021 in fear for her safety, exposes how… https://t.co/2PcURbfEF8 pic.twitter.com/WEVeeS4LjJ — Shoe (@samosaur) December 4, 2025 It probably would have been a good idea to find a nice third country to resettle these folks in — as in, one with a solid membership in Dar al-Islam — rather than to import a whole community which would bring its values and pathologies to our shores. Oh, but no. That wasn’t good enough for Corporate Joe Biden. So now you get a national security threat you can’t actually deal with, or else it’s evidence of “racism.” And do the Democrats care about Afghans and others who come from hostile cultures taking pot shots at National Guardsmen, or running mass scams on the taxpayer, or poisoning Americans by the hundred thousand with foreign drugs? Hell, no. BREAKING: Pramila Jayapal just announced a new bill to completely eliminate the ability of DHS to detain illegal aliens and require that illegals be given taxpayer funded lawyers: It has over 123 Democrat co-sponsors in the House. pic.twitter.com/j3oR2o5mWE — Greg Price (@greg_price11) December 3, 2025 I said on X that I’d call Pramila Jayapal a traitor, except that to be a traitor, you have to owe allegiance to the country you’re committing treason against, and I’m not sure she ever accepted that duty. She’s just more of a domestic enemy than a traitor. The fact we’re in a position to have to make these distinctions is, in itself… problematic. And why? Well… JOHN SOLOMON: 26 states are about to be forced to clean up their voter rolls, taking off non-citizens, dead people, the triple registrars, all of it. The ’26 election could be fundamentally different for the Democrats, because they won’t have their dirty voter rolls!… pic.twitter.com/oEJUqgdeE3 — Bannon’s WarRoom (@Bannons_WarRoom) December 4, 2025 4. The FBI Needs a Mascot. How About a Sloth? His name is Brian Cole, and he allegedly was the miscreant who planted pipe bombs at the front entrances of both the RNC and DNC in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021. And he got away with it for five years before the FBI finally found him in Woodbridge, Virginia. MORE details on this news we broke this am — @FBI arrested suspect 5-year-long pipe bomb case. Problem: suspect was identified in a fresh review of old evidence and could have possibly been arrested years ago, sources tell @KDilanianMSNOW and me. https://t.co/iuo3Tp6Uml — Carol Leonnig (@CarolLeonnig) December 4, 2025 Boy, you talk about an aggressive investigation. How about these guys? From the Pipe Bomber FBI Affidavit: The FBI tracked Brian Cole’s bomb making equipment purchases to Home Depot and WalMart. His cell phone pinged the area of the RNC and DNC on January 5, 2021. His car was placed a half mile from the bombs on January 5. pic.twitter.com/go7mKyqZme — Techno Fog (@Techno_Fog) December 4, 2025 So what do we know about Brian Cole? Well, would it surprise you to find out that he’s an Antifa lunatic? BREAKING: Pipe Bomber suspect ID’d as Brian Cole from Virginia, per NBC. At least one outlet describes him as having ties to Antifa. @julie_kelly2 working to confirm the reporting. This is a major development if proven accurate. We were told Antifa wasn’t involved in J6… https://t.co/82y2RPjiM1 — Andrew Kolvet (@AndrewKolvet) December 4, 2025 Nobody in the Ku Klux Klan has had a bowel movement in 40 years without the FBI having documented it in triplicate. Which isn’t a complaint, by the way. But you’d think Antifa would warrant similar treatment. And yet this Antifan commits one of the most high-profile “unsolved” crimes of domestic terrorism over the past decade, and Patel says the FBI finally solved it using… …no new evidence. I’m not going to trash Kash Patel and Dan Bongino as lots of others are doing. I don’t think Patel and Bongino have much to work with. I think the FBI is unsalvageable, and Patel’s role needs to be transformed into something similar to that of Linda McMahon’s at Education — which is to supervise your own obsolescence. (RELATED: DOJ Files Charges Against Antifa) There needs to be a legitimate counterintelligence agency in this country, and it needs to be run by people who aren’t corrupted by foreign intelligence agencies, as the FBI’s current counterintelligence operations are. And there is a federal role in law enforcement to be had, though the current model is fairly suspect, and perhaps the feds should operate as a support staff, clearinghouse, and facilitator for local and state law enforcement agencies to work together. But if it takes five years to find a pipe bomber just down the road in Virginia with all the resources the FBI has, you aren’t trying. And you aren’t fooling anybody. And the only rational response is to say this agency has run its course and needs to be atomized, if perhaps to be rebuilt along different lines. 5. God Does I could go on with the expositions and suggestions of treachery, but I just can’t. And I suspect you need a break as well. So instead, I’ll introduce you to my favorite band, the CMA Award-winning Red Clay Strays out of Mobile, Alabama. Lead singer Brandon Coleman expressed a bit of confusion about winning a country music award when his band doesn’t really identify as a country band. But there isn’t a current category to fit the Strays into; they’re more of a blues-y Southern rock band, but that isn’t a category of its own. Or perhaps more to the point, we put folks like that into the country category. They used to call it Country & Western. Maybe it ought to be Country & Southern now. Anyway, I could show you a whole bunch of different videos to expose you to the Red Clay Strays. But this is the one. Enjoy. And have yourself a merry little weekend! READ MORE from Scott McKay: Nashville Hates You Back, Aftyn Lane Kiffin to LSU Is a Massive Win for College Football Leslie Corbly’s Progressive Prejudice Is a Book Every Christian Should Read

This Sunday, a biologically male pastor at a United Methodist Church in upstate New York announced that he no longer considers himself to be a man and that he is embracing a new identity as a woman. “The best way to put this,” the Rev. Phil Phaneuf told his North Chili United Methodist Church congregation, “is that I’m not becoming a woman. I’m giving up pretending to be a man.” Phaneuf clarified that he believes God supports his “transition,” as he has felt the Holy Spirit surrounding him during this process. “If you felt God’s Holy Spirit surrounding you in ways that you haven’t felt in years,” he said, “would you have a sense that that might be something that God’s okay with?” Phaneuf was met with joyful cheers from his congregation and with total acceptance from the U.S. leadership of the United Methodist Church. His bishop, Bishop Héctor A. Burgos-Núñez, put out a statement commending Phaneuf’s courage and affirming that Phaneuf’s identity as a woman is recognized by God. “I give thanks for Rev. Dr. Phil Phaneuf’s courage and honesty in embracing the fullness of who God created her to be,” said the bishop. “Her gifts in preaching, pastoral care, and service continue to enrich our connection. We stand together in love and prayer as she walks this path.” Only a few years ago, Phaneuf’s announcement may have been met with unofficial support from his own congregation, but his bishop probably would not have been able to hail his transgender identity as “the fullness of who God created her to be.” That is because it has only been in very recent years that the United Methodist Church has capitulated on its longstanding positions that homosexual relations are not acceptable in God’s eyes and that people who identify as transgender should not be pastors. (RELATED: Conservative Methodist Exit Nears End Point) In 2024, in a move delayed by COVID, delegates of the United Methodist Church voted to strike language in the denomination’s Book of Discipline that described homosexuality as “incompatible with Christian teaching.” In addition, the denomination removed the ban on the ordination of LGBTQ clergy. It also reformulated its definition of marriage to simply be a sacred covenant between “two adult persons of consenting age.” Ministers in the United States would be able to decide for themselves whether to perform same-sex marriage ceremonies, while United Methodist conferences outside of the United States — including in Africa, the Philippines, and Eastern Europe — would be free to continue not ordaining LGBTQ clergy or celebrating same-sex weddings. In anticipation of and immediately following this change, a quarter of United Methodist churches in the United States left the denomination. They were joined in leaving by many conferences of the global church. Many of these churches became members of the newfound, more conservative Global United Methodist Church. Among those who left were the Côte d’Ivoire Annual Conference, which is said to have just short of 700,000 members. Its members specifically objected to the United Methodist Church’s change in stance on homosexuality and its altered definition of marriage. They voted to leave the church last year. In speaking for the Côte d’Ivoire Conference on their decision, the Rev. Isaac Bodjé said, “The change of language related to sanctions in the 2016 Book of Discipline is a serious departure from the Wesleyan principle that bases the Methodist Church on two key pillars: doctrine on the one hand and discipline on the other.” The United Methodist Church’s continual insistence that the church in Côte d’Ivoire could continue to avoid ordaining LGBTQ clergy or celebrating same-sex wedding ceremonies was apparently not enough to overcome the conference’s discomfort with belonging to a church that now claimed that what it upheld to be sinful and contrary to God’s law was, in fact, a holy, covenantal marriage. The vote in Côte d’Ivoire was not even close. It was a unanimous vote to leave. Presumably, had the Côte d’Ivoire Conference stayed on, they would have been horrified to belong to a church in which a fellow bishop upheld a biologically male pastor’s “transition” as blessed by God. In his message affirming Phaneuf’s transgender identity, Bishop Burgos-Núñez noted that Methodists worldwide may exercise freedom of conscience when it comes to LGBTQ issues. “The reforms,” explained Burgos-Núñez, “preserve freedom of conscience: clergy retain the discretion to decide whether to officiate same-sex marriages, and congregations may discern how best to embody these changes considering their own context and convictions.” Evidently, however, for many former Methodists, leaving such matters up for individual conscience was not a compromise they were willing to accept. In fact, many United Methodists globally feared that the allowance for them to follow their conscience regionally was simply a step toward later forcing them to accept LGBTQ clergy and gay marriage. In fact, many United Methodists globally feared that the allowance for them to follow their conscience regionally was simply a step toward later forcing them to accept LGBTQ clergy and gay marriage. After all, it did seem as though United Methodists in the United States were motivated to accept homosexual relations as a matter of moral necessity. In fact, the welcome video on the United Methodist Church’s website puts this emphasis on acceptance of homosexuality front and center. It says, “We’ve begun to be vulnerable with our past, admit our shortcomings, tell whole stories, and repent for our past social sins of racism, sexism, colonialism, and homophobia — all so that we can be God’s grace shining in and through the world.” Many United Methodists outside of the United States would presumably read a declaration of repentance for homophobia as acceptance of homosexuality. At the same time, many United Methodists in the United States feared that the allowance for LGBTQ clergy and same-sex weddings that they had just obtained would soon be overturned because of the growth of the United Methodist Church globally and the shrinkage of the church in the United States. Those fears were only added to when large numbers of United Methodist churches in the U.S. split off from the denomination because of the change in teaching on marriage. Their numbers had been large enough to garner acceptance of homosexual relations, but they worried over whether that number would hold. The two sides, the United Methodist church in and outside of the United States, reached an agreement to resolve these fears last month when they voted for “worldwide regionalization,” meaning that the church in the United States is no longer in charge of the whole denomination. Instead, the denomination is made up of nine equal regions that can make their own decisions on critical matters. In this setup, the allowance of freedom of conscience on matters of homosexuality is no longer granted by the U.S. church but inherently flows from the divided structure of the church. Under the new structure, which radically changed the denomination’s constitution, the U.S. and the eight church regions in Africa, Europe, and the Philippines all have legislative authority and can adapt the Book of Discipline, publish books of worship, set their own standards of character, change requirements for ordination, develop practices for marriages, and change offenses under church law. Essentially, they can do almost everything but deny the Trinity and the most basic teachings of Christianity. Keeping the denomination united under such an extreme devolution of decision-making appears practically impossible. If the church in Africa and the church in the U.S., after all, can have different moral and practical standards on everything, in what sense are they a united church? What even is the point of proclaiming to be one? But many progressives in the United States have long supported this plan of regionalization under the explanation that they believe it brings about “decolonization.” The Reconciling Ministries Network, which calls for “the full inclusion of LGBTQ+ people in The United Methodist Church,” celebrated the regionalization vote in the first place because it “Decolonizes our polity and relationships across regions.” Presumably, the organization also supports the fact that the new structure ensures that United Methodists outside of the United States cannot compel the U.S. on LGBTQ issues. All of this division over LGBTQ issues has not left the United Methodist Church in a good place. Apart from bleeding members both internationally and in the American context, the denomination has been left in dire financial straits. Last month, the president of the United Methodist Church’s finance agency said, quite simply, “The church’s financial house is on fire.” The denomination’s budget for 2025–2028 was cut a full 40 percent, but already, cash flows are not high enough to meet even that goal. As of the end of October, the denomination had only collected 51.8 percent of needed funds from the United States and 40.7 percent of needed funds in Africa, Europe, and the Philippines. The denomination says the 40 percent budget cut is due to disaffiliations from the United Methodist Church, but the church is also facing the prospect of falling church membership even outside of those disaffiliations. In 2023 alone, the United Methodist Church lost 1.2 million members. And, between 1968 and 2022, the church’s population in the U.S. more than halved. Things don’t look good for the United Methodist Church. And the declaration by the Rev. Phil Phaneuf that he now wants to go by Phillippa — coupled with the bishop’s overwhelming support for his “transition” — is unlikely to reassure United Methodists who have for now been comforted with talk of respect for freedom of conscience. The United Methodist Church has chosen to go full woke, and, like the rest of the denominations that have decided to do so, it is facing the consequences: a falling population and a financial situation that is “on fire.” READ MORE from Ellie Gardey Holmes: Sacramento Power Brokers Rally Behind Dana Williamson Is Gretchen Whitmer Backing Down From 2028? Temple Shows DEI’s Ongoing Hold on Medical Schools

Imagine a doctor who treated low blood pressure with medication that lowered it further. When treating a patient with high blood pressure, they prescribed drugs that raised it. We would question whether this doctor understood basic medicine, and rightly so. Unfortunately, this is exactly how Washington approaches economic policy. Across decades and multiple administrations of both parties, the one constant is that Washington will push on exactly the wrong side of the market in sector after sector and then act surprised when the predictable results occur. In education, healthcare, and housing, Washington floods the market with demand-side subsidies while leaving supply artificially constrained. As a result, prices soar and affordability plummets. Meanwhile, in the war on drugs, policymakers have obsessed over supply-side interdictions while ignoring the demand side. As a result, prices rise, consumption barely budges, and drug cartels get richer. Policymakers could not do worse if they tried. (RELATED: The Forces Fueling America’s 45-Year Debt Addiction) Education: Subsidizing Demand While Restraining Supply With the passage of the Higher Education Act of 1965, the federal government began its campaign to make college “affordable” by putting taxpayer money into the pockets of students across the nation. The Congressional Budget Office projects that Pell Grants, authorized under this Act, will cost $38.1 billion, distributed to 7.4 million undergraduate students, for an average award of about $5,120 per student. According to the Congressional Research Service, federal student loan debt now exceeds $1.6 trillion. Despite the bluster of spending on higher education, Congress routinely finds ways to increase spending and expand access to subsidized loans or grants. (RELATED: End US Taxpayer Support for the Higher Education Gravy Train) The theory behind this is straightforward. When college is unaffordable, Congress can step in and give students more purchasing power, thus making college more “accessible.” But this ignores the reality of supply-side considerations. Higher education is an incredibly regulated industry in the United States. Accreditation requirements create serious barriers to entry, making it harder for new colleges to enter the market and absorb some of the increased spending. State licensing boards restrict who is allowed to offer degrees. Creating new facilities, in addition to being expensive, requires navigating a labyrinthian set of regulations and requirements. All of this, in economic terms, makes the supply of higher education in the U.S. highly inelastic, meaning that it does not expand much in response to increased demand. Any student who takes Econ 101 can tell you what happens when policy boosts demand and regulations restrict supply: the price will rise. According to the BLS, college tuition has almost tripled just since the turn of the century. In fact, tuition has grown faster than overall inflation in almost every single year going back to 1980. (RELATED: America’s Universities: A Multi-Generational Perspective) Education Secretary William Bennett noticed the effect of federal funding on education back in 1987, which eventually became known as the “Bennett Effect.” This effect has gone through rigorous testing, the most famous of which is a 2015 study by the Federal Reserve of New York, which finds that for every one-dollar increase in Pell Grant maximums leads to an average of a 37-cent increase in college tuition. Pell Grant recipients might, on net, come out ahead, but for students who do not qualify for these, college becomes less and less affordable. Healthcare: More of the Same but Higher Stakes The healthcare market exhibits exactly the same phenomenon. The only difference is that there are a lot more zeroes involved. On the demand side, Washington has steadily expanded access to insurance through Medicare, Medicaid, and various tax incentives for employer-sponsored health coverage. With the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, Washington added another channel through which to boost demand for healthcare. Looking at BLS data, however, overall healthcare employment has grown at roughly the same rate (2-2.5 percent) each year both before and after the ACA’s passage. In fact, healthcare employment grew more slowly in the years immediately following the ACA’s passage than it did in the years before. While Washington boosts the demand for healthcare, it has stifled the supply, despite graduating more medical students than ever. (RELATED: Trump’s Pivot Could Make Health Care Affordable Again) The Balanced Budget Act of 1997 essentially froze residency programs funded by Medicare at their 1996 levels, creating what the American Association of Medical Colleges refers to as a “residency bottleneck.” According to their 2024 report, they project a shortage of 86,000 physicians by 2036 unless Congress acts to mitigate this. In June 2025, Congress introduced the Resident Physician Shortage Reduction Act of 2025, which would add approximately 2,000 residency slots per year from 2026 through 2032 if passed. Once again, the demand is outstripping supply, and quickly. As a result of all of this, and more, average family premiums for insurance have skyrocketed. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s annual reports, premiums have increased by 86 percent, from $13,770 in 2010 to $26,993 in 2025. If the government shutdown of 2025 has revealed anything, it’s that the Affordable Care Act relies on increasingly growing subsidies to maintain its “affordability.” Housing: Subsidizing Buyers Into Bidding Wars Artificially expanding purchasing power in a market with constrained supply simply bids up existing home prices, transferring wealth to current owners and exacerbating price volatility. Governments lean on demand-side interventions — 50-year mortgages, tax incentives, down-payment subsidies, credit-expansion programs, etc. —  to make housing appear more affordable, and in some cases to be more affordable for initial/short periods of time. Tools such as these are politically attractive because they deliver conspicuous, short-run benefits to buyers. In fact, though, they fail to confront the structural forces driving prices higher. Artificially expanding purchasing power in a market with constrained supply simply bids up existing home prices, transferring wealth to current owners and exacerbating price volatility. In effect, policymakers stimulate demand while leaving the underlying scarcity unchanged. (RELATED: A 50-Year Mortgage Is a Financial Narcotic) In contrast, the supply side of the housing market remains heavily restricted through zoning limits, environmental reviews, density caps, and construction-sector bottlenecks. Those constraints prevent builders from responding to higher prices with adequate construction: the very mechanism through which markets relieve shortages. When supply can’t expand, or expands at a relative crawl, even the most well-designed, well-intentioned demand side policies aggravate the imbalance, ensuring that “affordability” gains are swallowed up by higher prices. Sound (and basic) economics, therefore, points to a simple but regularly ignored truth: without generating a freer, faster, and more flexible means of supplying housing, no amount of financial engineering will deliver a sufficient supply of homes to assuage the current shortfall and consequent price increases. (RELATED: LA Is Destroying Its Housing Market) War on Drugs: Getting it Backwards Governments inevitably respond to widespread drug usage by attacking supply: criminalization, interdiction, border enforcement, even military and covert action abroad. Focusing on distribution networks is visible, politically rewarding, and signals action without confronting the deeper drivers (and even deeper economics) of the consumption of illicit substances. Constraining supply in the face of persistent demand simply raises prices, which means that the profit margins of illicit producers are increased and riskier forms of production and trafficking result. The result is that a more lucrative black market is produced, and with it an increasingly violent drug trafficking business; all without a meaningful reduction in drug use. What remains unaddressed in this case is the demand side: the social, psychological, cultural, and economic forces that sustain drug consumption. Reducing demand in this case requires asking exceedingly difficult questions about mental health, despair, social decay, medical overprescription, and the search for meaning or relief, all of which governments are ill-prepared to answer, let alone address. These are costly, complex issues for which no amount of supply suppression can ultimately succeed. Even if it could — and there would be tremendous costs to liberty and prosperity to do so — intoxicants are readily substitutable for individuals seeking an escape, whatever the ultimate reason for doing so. The Common Thread How can we explain Washington’s consistent pattern of getting this so wrong? The answer is remarkably simple once we understand the political incentives at work. Demand-side subsidies in education, healthcare, and housing create concentrated benefits and diffused costs. Students, patients, and homebuyers all get immediate benefits. The costs, which are higher prices for everyone, are diffused throughout all of society and only materialize gradually. Politicians in office can take credit for the benefits, avoid the blame, and stick future policymakers with the task of “fixing” the problems. Supply-side reforms in these industries create diffuse benefits in the form of lower prices for consumers while threatening concentrated benefits. Reducing barriers to creating new colleges and universities threatens existing colleges and universities. Expanding residency programs and allowing nonphysician caregivers to perform more medical care threatens existing physicians’ income. Loosening zoning regulations threatens homeowners’ property values. These concentrated interests can (and do) effectively lobby against reforms. The benefactors of these reforms, i.e., the consumers, lack organized advocates on their behalf. Politicians do not win votes by being effective; they win votes by appearing effective. In the war on drugs, supply-side enforcement is highly visible and dramatic. Coast Guard seizures, attacks on vessels allegedly carrying drugs, DEA raids, and drug busts at the border all garner high amounts of media coverage. Demand side reforms, such as addiction treatment programs and mental health services, are quiet, unglamorous, and easily portrayed as being “soft on crime.” Politicians do not win votes by being effective; they win votes by appearing effective. The pattern is consistent across decades, administrations, and party lines because the political incentives are consistent. Ultimately, the only path out of this cycle is to realign policy with basic economics: expand supply where shortages exist, and address demand where consumption drives harm. That requires political courage, insofar as it rewards long-run outcomes rather than short-run optics, and a willingness to confront entrenched interests that benefit from the status quo. Until the incentives change, Washington will continue treating economic symptoms while worsening the underlying conditions. READ MORE:

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by Michael Snyder, End Of The American Dream: Fertility rates have been rapidly declining all over the globe.  If this trend continues, the global population will fall dramatically in the years ahead even if we do not experience major wars, worldwide pandemics, nightmarish famines and historic natural disasters.  Of course this is exactly what many […]

from State Of The Nation: Warmonger-in-Chief Trump doesn’t even need the C.I.A. to do color revolutions…… …he just surrounds the country with the full force of the U.S. Military, and then issues an ultimatum to the democratically elected head of state of the formerly sovereign nation—WOW!!! TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/ Submitted by A Veteran Intelligence Analyst […]