America Is Taking a High-Speed Train to Bankruptcy

• On December 8, the federal government made two seemingly disconnected but inexorably linked announcements that do not bode well for America's future.
• First, the Department of Transportation hyped an $8.2 billion grant for passenger rail projects. Second, the Congressional Budget Office revealed that the federal government racked up a $383 billion deficit in just the first two months of FY 2024, with interest payments increasing by a shocking 65 percent year-over-year.
• Washington's continued refusal to rein in wasteful and unnecessary deficit spending has led to an unfocused, unaccountable, and increasingly unaffordable federal government that threatens to derail the economy.
• To see why, start with the rail money—the bulk of which will go to California. The state's High-Speed Rail Authority will receive $3.1 billion to continue its singularly awful 520-mile boondoggle from San Francisco to Los Angeles. The Biden administration is also gambling $3 billion on a high-speed rail line connecting Los Angeles and Las Vegas
• One small step in the right direction would be for Washington to stop bilking taxpayers for the sake of rail projects that might never be completed, let alone come close to being worth the cost.

Schedule an Interview: David Ditch

Battling the Cartels Requires a Refocus

• In the fight to secure our nation from dangerous illicit drugs, the Joint Interagency Task Force South (JIATF-S), based in Key West, Florida, has been waging a successful regional coalition for decades.
• Despite this effort, victory has been elusive, given few resources and a constrained U.S. focus, allowing the cartels to adapt and survive.
• There is urgency to act. The United States is suffering from a pandemic of illicit narcotics, notably fentanyl, which killed over 73,000 Americans last year.
• Securing Americans from the scourge of illegal drugs will mean actually putting the cartels out of business. Doing this will require cutting the cartels’ critical narcotics maritime trade routes—not only south-to-north routes to North America but also the other routes that keep them in business.
• Cutting all maritime smuggling routes is the best way to defeat the cartels, their Chinese enablers, and the Fentanyl overdose epidemic.

Schedule an Interview: Brent Sadler

Biden Becomes America’s Pinocchio-in-Chief

• President Biden’s economic performance is so indefensible that he has resorted to distorting his predecessor’s record, as if that will distract from the current economic malaise. It’s much like how Pinocchio, when caught doing wrong, lied about everyone around him to distract from his own failures and to blame others.
• But the average American is suffering financially so much that no amount of gaslighting can distract from his current plight, and the numbers prove it.
• Fully 60% of American families are living paycheck to paycheck, and a record number of people have had to take on a second or third job.
• The average American worker now pays $4.97 per hour in the hidden tax of inflation, effectively doubling how much he or she pays in federal income tax. That inflation is a direct result of Bidenomics, an agenda best defined as government overspending and overregulating, combined with borrowing and printing trillions of dollars. The predictable result was devaluation of the dollar.
• Instead of acknowledging reality and his own culpability, Biden purposely muddies the waters, throwing out undefined terms like “trickle-down economics” and misrepresenting the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 as a “tax cut for the rich” even though IRS data show the benefits went disproportionately to the middle class.
• With each fib, the Biden White House loses credibility and its gaslighting becomes less effective, just as Pinocchio’s nose grew with each lie and it became blatantly obvious that his stories couldn’t be trusted. That’s why, despite overwhelmingly positive media coverage, Bidenomics is viewed with such disfavor today.

Schedule an Interview: EJ Antoni