Herr Kurt Schlichter's hit piece on Thomas Massie says Massie married a leftist after his long-time wife died in 2024, when she was actually a staffer for Senator Rand Paul

"No heat" Massie's 2021 Christmas Card Photo

 

And Rand Paul once again strongly endorses Massie's re-election.

 Good Riddance to the Awful Thomas Massie

... Before his wife sadly died young a couple of years ago, he was content to be a fringe weirdo with bad hair and no heat. Once she tragically passed away, he visited a hairstylist, married a leftist staffer 20 years his junior, and decided he needed to broaden his horizons, which meant helping the Democrats and shafting the GOP more openly than before. ... 

US economic growth peaked during the Reagan administration because America is a debt-based economy and we turned our backs on the formula during it

 The trend for the growth of the total universe of US debt, TCMDO or total credit market debt outstanding, rolled over after 1985, one year after GDP did.

TCMDO is the real money, almost $108 trillion at the end of 2025. In 1985 it was $9 trillion.

M2 was merely $22 trillion at the end of 2025. 

TCMDO is the sum total of debt expansion throughout the sectors of the economy.

Historically, most people have experienced it this way.

You get a full time job, which itself was created by a business selling debt in the form of stocks and bonds in order to expand its operations and future profits, and you go buy a house, putting down $100k on a $500k property. The bank loans you the $400k through fractional reserve lending on a small portion of its reserves but secured by the house. That new money is created out of thin air but is actually represented by the "guaranteed" future income stream of your job for 30 years, because you're a smart, reliable guy who never misses a day of work. TCMDO expands, and expands some more each time this happens.

When the conditions disappear for full time job creation, the process slows down. You can see the decline in the growth of the economy in the decline of the growth of the debt. Yes, everything is still growing, but not as vigorously.

Full time as a percent of population peaked 26 years ago, in 2000, at 53.55%, but retested the 1975 low of 46.74% in 2010 and 2011 at 46.97%, back-to-back years in the Late Great Recession.

Housing strength persisted in the immediate post-Reagan period on the illusory basis of windfalls from massive ordinary income tax cuts combined with the demographic peaking of the 1957 Baby Boom turning 40 in 1997 driving demand, but the hollowing out of the economy had already begun with the move of 20,000 manufacturers abroad after the 1986 tax reform.

Early warning signs began flashing already during the Clinton era.

Clinton immediately raised taxes in 1993 after he promised not to raise them in 1992, began a long series of cuts to federal government employment, and gutted the US Navy.

Americans were already struggling at the time and ominously tapped housing equity to sustain their middle class standard of living. Owners' Equity in Real Estate averaged 70% 1982-1986 inclusive, but plunged ten points within a decade to 60% 1996-1999 inclusive.

Homes had become piggy banks, preparing the way for 1997, the year Clinton and the Republicans went further still and turned homes into mere commodities, which in turn prepared the way for the housing catastrophe of 2008. From 1997 a flood of 70,000 more manufacturers began moving out as globalization kicked into high gear and China gained admission to the WTO in 2001.

Almost no one today wants to say out loud how unpatriotic this whole business was. 

Reagan tried to convince us that we know best what to do with our own money, and we promptly turned around and staked our fortunes on foreign investment, not domestic.

Libertarianism is a lie.  

Today you will be hard-pressed to identify a major manufacturing concern with 100% of its operations in the US. Tesla is a standout (heavily subsidized by the federal government!), but other than that most of the businesses which remain patriotically committed to the American idea are pretty small beer compared with how it used to be. 

The formerly domestic debt expansion was exported abroad, creating middle classes where none existed before, especially in East Asia, and doing so cost businesses A LOT less, the key attraction for them.

As a result, enormous profits accrued to the owners of capital while wage earners here struggled to maintain the American dream. Wealth inequality soared, and now our children are 40 before they buy their first home.   

TCMDO grew at a compound annual rate of 8.355% 1945-1985, but at only 6.398% 1985-2025. The change from optimism to pessimism can be traced in the trend lines.

Continued growth of TCMDO at the former rate but after 1985 would have yielded TCMDO at the end of 2025 of $223 trillion, or 106% more "money" than we actually have.

$115 trillion is "missing", or at least something like that. We will never know for sure, but some of us can still imagine because we watched the great betrayal actually happen.

This is why I say socialism is the future, not because I want it or because I think it will work.

People are going to figure this out eventually, get angry, and do the wrong thing, just like we did during the Reagan administration. 

 

 

So-called libertarian Mackinac Center for Public Policy advocates for limiting local control of zoning laws, blames local governments for high house prices, homelessness, and out-migration as if Michigan were California

 Michigan should embrace zoning reform, reject housing subsidies: Limiting what local governments can zone is not a strange concept

... Michigan needs to learn the lessons of other states. California allows strict local zoning and tries to solve its housing problems through large government subsidies. The result is sky-high housing costs, a large homeless population and people moving elsewhere. ... 

Local governments aren't to blame for federal legislation which turned homes into HELOC piggy banks and mere commodities to be pumped and dumped to escape capital gains taxation.

Fewer than 775,000 people are homeless in the United States, most of them by choice because of mental illness and drug abuse. Meanwhile there are 149,006,000 total housing units in the United States, 15,305,000 of which are unoccupied.

Things are already changing enough to make Michigan more attractive as a place to live. Michigan is a net in-migration state for the first time in 30 years in 2025.

There are no compelling reasons to take away local control of zoning authorities, unless you want the freedom to turn quiet neighborhoods where people want to live into Airbnb hellholes like Austin, Texas where many no longer do.

Ha, taxes coerce behavior whether you like it or not, so you'd better decide what behavior you want because you're going to get it good and hard either way

 Tax Power Not Designed To Coerce Behavior - Gary Abernathy, RCEnergy

... the Fifth Circuit’s ruling is a welcome nod to the fact that the federal government cannot take tax laws intended to increase revenue and twist them merely to regulate business activities. ...

I mean, do these people not remember Ronald Reagan?

“If you want more of something, subsidize it; if you want less of something, tax it.” 

But Ronald Reagan ignorantly reduced high marginal ordinary income tax rates, destroying the need for the owners of capital to make the arbitrage decision going forward between either choosing low long term capital gains tax rates or the high ordinary income tax rates. 

The owners of capital had been no dummies and had picked the low rates for years. That drove domestic investment throughout the post-war because it had to, and produced the good paying full time jobs and GDP which too few even remember now. But faced with an easier path to low taxes, they took it.

The tax windfall set the conditions for the hollowing-out of the U.S. economy when those billions of dollars met the opening to China in 2001, where they worked for pennies on the dollar and regulations were practically non-existent.

20,000 domestic manufacturing establishments alone were lost in the wake of the 1986 tax reform, and 70,000 more after 1997. Millions of manufacturing jobs went with them, and with them the American middle class and the American dream.

All because Ronald Reagan, the liberal, thought rich people knew best what to do with their own money.

In the mid-1980s we had maybe 35 billionaires and people in their 20s routinely married and bought their first home. Today we have 1,135 billionaires and people are nearly 40 before they can afford to buy their first home. And we have Ph.D.s all over the place who can't spell in their own language let alone in a foreign one.  

Put a random set of 100 people in a room and the fact is only 25% of them are college material, but the rest need and deserve good jobs the same as they do, and they aren't going to be "knowledge" jobs.

I can still remember my company's HR head telling my truck-driving employees in the 1990s that they had to start thinking of themselves as "knowledge workers" instead of as what they were. I got the hell out of there. By 2003 most of those new "knowledge workers" of mine had lost their jobs driving truck when the company had to "restructure". Just one tale in tens of thousands of such tales.

America will not begin to be great again without tax policy which favors the American people over some eggheaded libertarian's idea of a principle which favors only the rich. 

In other words, this would mean Trump is going to cut and run from the Persian Gulf just like he cut and ran from the Red Sea on May 6, 2025

 Trump Tells Aides He’s Willing to End War Without Reopening Hormuz: Administration officials assess that forcing the waterway back open would mean extending the military mission

WASHINGTON—President Trump told aides he’s willing to end the U.S. military campaign against Iran even if the Strait of Hormuz remains largely closed, administration officials said, likely extending Tehran’s firm grip on the waterway and leaving a complex operation to reopen it for a later date.

In recent days, Trump and his aides assessed that a mission to pry open the chokepoint would push the conflict beyond his timeline of four to six weeks. He decided that the U.S. should achieve its main goals of hobbling Iran’s navy and its missile stocks and wind down current hostilities while pressuring Tehran diplomatically to resume the free flow of trade. If that fails, Washington would press allies in Europe and the Gulf to take the lead on reopening the strait, the officials said. ...

 

It's embarrassing to have a whiny little baby for president demonstrating everyday that he's not up to the job of being the leader of the free world

 Trump lashes out at UK and France, telling allies ‘the U.S.A. won’t be there to help you anymore’

... “You’ll have to start learning how to fight for yourself, the U.S.A. won’t be there to help you anymore, just like you weren’t there for us. Iran has been, essentially, decimated. The hard part is done. Go get your own oil!,” he concluded. ... For its part, Tehran continues to demonstrate its ability to dominate and derail maritime traffic in the strait, hitting a fully laden Kuwaiti oil tanker in the anchorage area of Dubai’s port earlier Tuesday.