Welcome!
WELCOME. I am Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill, writer, conservative, and far-right racist-sexist-homophobe.
My current blog is at Substack:
I have written two books:
I have written weekly op-eds at The American Thinker for 20 years:
I have created the following websites on US government spending going back to 1792:
I have created the following websites on UK government spending going back to 1692:
I have created the following informational websites about the United States:
Once upon a time I wrote the following blogs:
Road to the Middle Class is the site for my book that investigates and celebrates the cultural artefacts that ordinary people appropriate as they struggle to adapt from country ways to the demands of life in the city. Start here.
An American Manifesto is the site for my book about "life after liberalism". Start here.
USgovernmentspending.com is a resource on government spending in the United States. It presents tables and charts on federal, state, and local government expenditure in the United States from 1902 to the present. Spending data are sourced from US budget data and US Census reports. Start here.
USgovernmentrevenue.com is a resource on government taxes and receipts in the United States. It presents tables and charts on federal, state, and local government taxes, charges, use fees, and business revenue in the United States from 1902 to the present. Revenue data are sourced from US budget data and US Census reports. Start here.
UKpublicspending.co.uk is a resource on public spending in the United Kingdom. It presents tables and charts on public expenditure by central government, local authorities, and public corporations in the United Kingdom from 1900 to the present. Spending data is sourced from UK government Public Expenditure Statistical Analyses, the UK National Statistics “Blue Book,” and academic studies. Start here.
UKpublicrevenue.co.uk is a resource on public revenue in the United Kingdom. It presents tables and charts on public revenues by central government, and local authorities in the United Kingdom from 1900 to the present. Revenue data is sourced from UK Office for Budget Responsibility, the UK National Statistics and academic studies. Start here.
American Thinker publishes my op-eds most weeks. Click here.
US Stuck on Stupid analyzes the perfect storm of political bungling in the years from 1929 to 1939 that plunged the American people into untold misery during the Great Depression. Start here.
US Presidential Elections tabulates the results of presidential elections going back to 1788. Start here.
US Midterm Elections tabulates the history of midterm elections for the US Senate and the US House of Representatives going back to 1790. You can sort the elections by year, by party strength, and by party gains and losses. Start here.
Road to the Middle Class Blog is a blog that investigates and celebrates the cultural artefacts that ordinary people appropriate as they struggle to adapt from country ways to the demands of life in the city. Start here.
An American Manifesto is a blog about "life after liberalism". Start here.
Biography
I AM CHRISTOPHER CHANTRILL, a member of the international capitalist conspiracy. Both my grandfathers owned and operated import/export businesses in the early twentieth century, one in St. Petersburg, Russia, where my father was born, and the other in Kobe, Japan, where my mother was born.
I was born in India and raised and educated in England. I immigrated to the United States in 1968 and worked for many years designing and implementing utility control systems and software in Seattle.
Soon after moving to Seattle, I instinctively revolted against the suffocating left-coast culture of the Soviet of Washington, and soon came to revere the four great Germans who helped inspire the Reagan revolution: Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, Leo Strauss, and Eric Voegelin. Since then I have broadened my appreciation of “The German Turn” that has transformed the world over the last 200 years.
I have written for Liberty, FrontPageMag.com, and The American Thinker. My book Road to the Middle Class celebrates the self-governing culture of the United States in which enthusiastic Christianity, education, mutual aid, and living under law have taught generations of immigrants to rise from indigence in the countryside to a life of competence and prosperity in the city. My book An American Manifesto: Life after Liberalism tries to imagine what America would look like after the end of left-wing politics and big government.
Disclaimer and Transparency
WE make no respresentation about the accuracy of the data presented in these websites. Nor does Christopher Chantrill represent himself to possess any formal qualifications to select, evaluate or present the information. Users are urged to check all data against the published data sources and to report any errors or inconsistencies.
The websites have no relationship with any government institution, or any other institution. They are supported solely by advertising and by the life, fortune, and sacred honor of Christopher Chantrill.
Daily Blogging
WE BLOG DAILY, Monday to Friday, chiefly on national US politics, religion, education, mutual aid, and law. We also look at our junior partners in the global Anglospheric hegemony, the British. It is hard to say why, but very often our blogging zeroes in like a laser on liberal hypocrisies, monopolies, and sinecures. Of course, we love our liberal friends to bits, but we do not take them quite as seriously as they do. If we get too pompous and serious, please get in touch and tell us to lighten up.
We love to get email from our readers.
And you can follow on Twitter 
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Enjoy.
After the Dem Glorious Victory, Why Change the Rules?
For some years, our Democratic friends have been pushing a National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. The idea is that each state will agree to instruct the state electors elected to the Electoral College to vote for the presidential candidate with the highest popular vote nationwide.
Right now, the small states are favored in the Electoral College because a state’s vote equals its number of Senators plus representatives. The big states with lots of voters (and especially those big states that vote overwhelmingly Democratic) feel like they are short changed.
Of course, the whole point of the Electoral College was partly to encourage the small states to vote for the Constitution in 1787 and partly to make them feel that they wouldn’t be buried by the big states in the future.
Obviously, if you are a Democrat, this is unjust. But I’ll bet that Democrats had no problem with the Electoral College back in the day when Democrats dominated the small states in the South.
Then, the DSA kiddies want to abolish the Senate and add additional states like DC and Puerto Rico and abolish the Senate. Of course they do, because until the day before yesterday the Republicans were a majority in the Senate and by adding DC and Puerto Rico the Dems would have more votes in the House of Representatives.
Yes, but suppose in the next few years, say because of AI, the small states all switch to Democratic and the big states all become Republican.
Be careful what you wish for.
But people in politics tend not to think beyond the next election or changing the rules so that they can win next week. Fact is, nobody knows what the map will look like 50 years from now.
Right now, our politics seems to feature right-wing populists, people of the ordinary middle class, rising to power in the Republican Party, and left-wing populists, young DSA kiddies in the educated class, rising to power in the Democratic Party. Both sets of populists are feeling that “they was robbed.” And of course they are. That’s what politics does, kiddies. It creates injustice for the losers: the more politics, the more injustice. But 50 years from now, who will be the winners, and who will be the losers?
Of course, the whole point of complicated political institutions is to slow down the enthusiasts who think that if they can only get political power then they can end injustice and create a just society with that political power.
Of course, when revolutionaries seize power they often stay in power for decades. Like the Bolsheviks, the Maoists, the Castros, the Iranian mullahs. Great fun, if you are the ruler.
Not so much for everyone else.
| Fri, 06 Nov 2026 22:33:24 GMT |
And Voters are the Affordability Problem
Everyone has every kind of reason why the Republicans lost in a midterm in the second term of a president: Iran, MAGA, affordability.
I wrote yesterday that “It’s the Economy, Stupid.” And later that day I got an email from Ted Cruz listing what was on voters’ mind, in order.
[C]ost of living, energy, and groceries… 30.6 percent of voters.
Corruption. Number two, 18.5%.
The cost of the Iran war, 10.1%.
The candidates are terrible, 7.9%.
Etc.
Oh dear. So why is cost of living — as in “affordability” — such a problem?
The proximate cause, of course, is COVID, during which the Federal Reserve increased the M2 money supply by 40% in two years.
Then there is government spending, at 40.25 percent of GDP for 2025. That is money out of the pocket of every worker and citizen and billionaire. Here are the main culprits:
1840s: Horace Mann pushes government schools for children.
1935: Social Security introduced to tax workers to pay for oldsters’ retirement. FDR was reelected in 1936.
1938: Federal National Mortgage Association founded. This subsidy for home mortgages makes housing prices higher, and caused major credit crisis in 2008.
1965: Medicare / Medicaid. Government healthcare for the old and the poor. Having government run healthcare. Science says it does not work.
Regulation of housing construction, especially after the rise of the environmental movement in the 1970s. Makes housing more expensive.
Regulation of automobiles, especially after the rise of the environmental movement. Makes cars more expensive.
Regulation of energy production, especially with the war on nuclear and the promotion of intermittent wind and solar, dur to environmental and climate movements. Makes energy less reliable and more expensive.
Here is a chart from USGovernmentSpending.com that shows the major categories of overall government spending in the last 25 years.
Currently, in 2025, the chart shows:
Gov. Health Care (incl. Medicaid): 8.25% of GDP.
Gov. Pensions: 6.81% of GDP.
Gov. Defense: 4.65% of GDP.
Gov. Education: 5.33% of GDP.
Gov. Welfare: 2.38% of GDP.
All other spending: 8.25% of GDP.
Total Government Spending: 40.25% of GDP.
Can you spell affordability?
You want a life that’s affordable? Then dump the government pension and save your own money. Dump the government healthcare that’s choked up with rules and regulation. Dump the education system that never had a clue.
This is not that hard. There’s science about this.
1920: Socialism can’t work because it can’t compute prices.
1944: Administrative government can’t run the economy because it can’t know enough to make sensible decisions.
1971: Economic regulation cannot work because of “regulatory capture” of the regulators by the regulated.
All this can’t be that hard.
Let’s take an example. Artificial Intelligence.
If the Democrats decide to nationalize SpaceX, that would violate Rule 1 and Rule 2. If the Democrats decide to regulate AI that would violate Rule 3.
And then there’s the electricity needed to power the AI data centers, when climate changers are making it impossible to build base-load electric generation.
See, this is not that hard.
Mind you, AI is going to rock the economy like you’ve never seen it.
| Thu, 05 Nov 2026 22:11:06 GMT |
At usgovernmentspending.com we have assembled a record of government spending in the United States for the last century. You can view government spending, federal, state, and local, for every year from 1902 to the present. And you can generate charts of that spending. more>>
At usgovernmentrevenue.com we have assembled a record of government revenue in the United States for the last century. You can view government receipts, federal, state, and local, for every year from 1902 to the present. And you can generate charts of that revenue. more>>
At ukpublicspending.co.uk we have assembled a record of public spending in the United Kingdom for the last century. You can view British public spending, central government and local authority, for every year from 1983 to the present. And you can generate charts of that spending. more>>
The Road to the Middle Class is a journey from a world of power to a world of trust and love. In religion, it is a journey from power gods that respond to sacrifice and augury to the God who makes a covenant with mankind. In education, it is a journey from the world of the spoken word to the world of the written word. In community, it is the journey from dependence on blood kin and upon clientage under a great lord to the mutual aid and the rules of the self-governing fraternal association. In law it is the journey from the violence of force and feud to the king’s peace, the law of contract, and private property.
Road to the Middle Class: The Book
With the failure of the welfare state, it is time to consider what comes next. In "An American Manifesto: Life After Liberalism" I develop a narrative about where we are and where we should go to redeem the American experiment.
An American Manifesto: The Book
Racial Discrimination
[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,”
Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300—301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District
Churches
[In the] higher Christian churches... they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
Sacrifice
[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values
Pentecostalism
Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization
Living the Virtues
When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue
Conservatism's Holy Grail
What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph
Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture
These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self
