If you were working for the North Carolina taxpayers, you would eliminate property taxes for all counties.

Continuing a trend of increasingly dismal projections, Social Security’s trustees have revised their prediction of when the massive benefit program’s trust fund will run out of money, moving it to the fourth quarter of 2032, sooner than last year’s projection that the money will run out in 2033. They attributed most of the the change to declining fertility rates and immigration, along with tax reductions included in Trump’s 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA). 

When the trust fund runs out, money will still be coming into the program via ongoing taxes from workers and self-employed individuals. However, without the ability to tap the trust fund, the program won’t be able to keep paying out full benefits. Under the law governing the program, insufficient assets means payouts must be cut for all beneficiaries by a uniform percentage. In their report posted on Tuesday, the trustees projected that benefits will have to be slashed by 22% in 2032.

More…

From Grok:

Current Political and Economic System

Russia is officially a democratic federal law-governed state with a republican form of government and a multi-party system. Key points from its constitution include:

• Recognition of ideological diversity — no ideology (including Communism) may be established as a state or obligatory ideology. constituteproject.org
• Protection of private property, economic freedom, competition, and multiple forms of ownership (private, state, municipal, etc.).
• A secular state with separation of religion and state.

In practice, Russia operates as an authoritarian regime under President Vladimir Putin, with significant state control over key sectors (often described as “state capitalism”). It has a market economy with private businesses, billionaires, stock markets, and inequality — features incompatible with classical Communism.

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It seems that most people do not understand the current governmental structure of Russia. They also do not seem to understand that Russia is a majority white, Christian nation. I wonder why our “government” and the EU continue to spread propaganda concerning Russia and other nations. Could it be that we are the baddies?

I think most working Americans know how bad inflation is.

h/t WRSA

We are taught that history is linear progress, but it’s cylical

Note: We can learn a lot from old dead white guys.

Twenty-two centuries ago, some Greek bloke called Polybius was hauled to Rome as a hostage, and he spent his captivity studying the place, not as a tourist, but the way a doctor studies a patient he already suspects is dying.

His conclusion was that no form of government lasts. They turn into one another, in order, like a wheel coming round.

The men who win a thing know what it cost, because it cost them. Their grandchildren are handed it for nothing, and nobody values what they were handed for nothing, so they spend it. The rot is that forgetting.

Some medieval Arab judge named Ibn Khaldun spent his life watching hard desert tribes conquer the soft cities of North Africa and then, within a few generations, go soft themselves and get conquered in their turn.

He had a name for the thing that held the conquerors together: ”asabiyyah”. It’s the loyalty you only get out of people who have starved and bled beside one another. Hardship makes it, and then comfort eats it.

He even put a clock on the decay: about four generations from the founder, who remembers, to the great-grandson, who looks at the whole inheritance and assumes, in Khaldun’s phrase, that it “was not built through effort” — that it had simply always been there, like the hills, and that one lets it slip.

A dying civilisation does throw up its strong man, Spengler granted. The chaos becomes unbearable, and somebody grips the wheel.

But that man may not be the cure. He’s perhaps the last symptom of the rot.

Continue reading …

How Christian-on-Christian Violence Perfected the Binary and Prepared the Modern Mind for Its Final Enclosure

Note: This is a follow up to The Finite Creed by E.M. Burlingame. More unsettling history. We really need to know how we got to where we are today.

Before proceeding, it is important to understand what enclosure is and why it’s so critical to our understanding of all that’s been, all that is occurring and all that follows. Enclosure is the oldest instrument of power — the fencing-off of what was once common and open, free, a field or a forest or a people’s shared ground, into parcels that can be owned, counted, and governed; and the enclosure of the mind is that same act turned inward, the conversion of the boundless open field of what a person might think into a narrow set of fenced and permitted positions among which they remain free only to choose. This is the one enclosure worth any price to a power that lives by owning people, for a fence around a field still needs a guard and a chain around a body still needs a jailer, but a wall built inside the mind is patrolled by the very prisoner it contains — which is why such powers will spend whole treasuries and whole centuries to raise it: the mind that encloses itself is the only subject who never has to be watched, never has to be paid for, and never tries to escape, because it has mistaken the wall for the world and the warden’s voice for its own.

This work follows the refinement of that enclosure across five movements, from Constantine’s pivot at the Milvian Bridge in 312 to the founding of the Bank of England in 1694. Most of its claims are structural rather than conspiratorial, and I’ll keep that distinction in view: an institution carrying a particular logic, applied generation after generation by administrators trained in that same logic, produces consistent results without needing a single guiding hand. Correlation of interest isn’t conspiracy. Institutions carry logic the way rivers carry water — not by intention, but by the shape of the channel. Where the argument does claim intention — and at one point it will, plainly — I’ll say so.

Continue reading …