Christopher Chantrill - Writer, conservative, government spending taxes debt deficit

Christopher Chantrill

Welcome!

WELCOME. I am Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill, writer and conservative. You can see my work at the following sites:

Road to the Middle Class contains the eponymous book and my daily blog. It 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 and blog. I am writing this book about "life after liberalism" and blogging about it as I go. All are invited to comment. 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.

US Spending 101 is a “university” of government spending. It features several walks through the pages of the usgovernmentspending.com suite of websites. And the learning never stops. But it is not a real university, nor does it offer credits for courses completed. 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.

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 .

Enjoy.

LATEST BLOG

Let's Fix All our Modern Religions

I just read a review of JD Vance’s new book Communion, about how he abandoned the “religion of status,” the “arrogant desire to rise above others,” and became a Catholic.

Back in the day when he was being raised by Mamaw, he believed in her “mainstream evangelical Protestantism.” But then he lost his faith in the military and adopted the religion of credentials, for as a child he had “envied people who had wealth, power, status, influence, prestige, and celebrity.”

But then he noticed, in the age of wokeness, that status depended enormously on having “right-think” rather than “wrong-think.” And his wife Usha wanted him “to be a good person, a good husband, and a good father (eventually).”

Yeah, I know. It’s all very well for people at the top of the status ranking to sneer at status, but…

I suppose we could say that, in our age as in all others, people want to live a meaningful life.

Now I am reading a thorough analysis of German Philosophy from Kant to Adorno. And the key thing that I am noticing is the question of God. From Kant to Schopenhauer the philosophers tried to weave God — usually rather clumsily — into their philosophical meaning of life.

But then comes Feuerbach and The Essence of Christianity — first translated into English by My Girl George Eliot. He’s the first guy to say that God is a mere projection of human values like “reason, will, love, and other perfections.” He opened the way for Nietzsche to go the whole hog and declare that “God is Dead and we have killed him.”

To me, this is all about the consequence of modern science developing a universe that just doesn’t fit the Christian idea of God and a seven-day Creation. We humans are not in Kansas anymore.

I think that, for the last nearly 200 years, the Death of God has freed humans to invent whole new secular religions and politics to imagine the meaning of life and the structure of society — in absolutely crazy ways from Marxism to fascism to the administrative state to wokism.

Which just shows that every human has some sort of a belief in a godlike concept, the way things oughta be, or will be, or can be, despite everything. I’d say that the reason the last century or so has been so chaotic is that, with “God is Dead” and the extinction of belief in a traditional God and the associated belief systems, the arena was opened to every crazy possibility — especially for people that believe in the religion of status and its corollary, the religion of equality.

Dare I say that a couple of centuries later we wise ones are beginning to think that the old traditional beliefs help to direct a life away from the craziness towards sanity, and that the secular cults have not exactly freed humans from the shackles of injustice and age-old bigotry by killing God and loosing upon the world the glories of secularism.

In the bad old days we had religious wars over whose God was true. Now we have secular religious wars over whose ideology is true. Nothing has changed.

Meanwhile we get, every generation or so, a technological revolution that blows up the conventional experience of reality.

What is to be done?

My line is the request of Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion / My Fair Lady for Professor Higgins to treat her “more friendly like.”

Hey, why not base our culture and society on the notion of “more friendly like?” We could do worse.

| Wed, 24 Jun 2026 01:20:56 GMT |

The Careening Corrupt Government of Bureaucrats

All the blue states are busy pushing tax increases. They don't seem to be proposing expensive new programs. So what gives?

OK. So we all know about the fraud. Look no further than California and Minnesota. Fortunately all the other blue states are fraud free. Wink wink…

But I just read a piece by Quillette’s boss Claire Lehmann titled “The Party of the Worker is Now the Party of the Bureaucrat.” She writes about her time working in Canberra for the Department of Health and Aging. Until she couldn't take it anymore.

But first, as a teenager and a college student, she worked in restaurants. So she knows what work means.

When Lehman worked for the department it hac 4-5000 employees. Now it has 7000. Here’s how it went.

On my first rotation, I was reprimanded for writing a ministerial letter too quickly. Two hours was sufficient time to write a letter I thought—one that mostly consisted of copy and pasting boilerplate from other letters—but according to the director of the team, I needed to take a day.
Why? Because they had nothing else for me to do. There were no meetings, no policies being drafted, and no conference papers for us to work on. So we had morning tea instead. And afternoon tea. We took long lunches. We did crossword puzzles to keep our brains active, and daily “quizzes” to alleviate the boredom. The Director of the section once sent a ministerial letter back to me asking me to delete a comma. I was excited. Because deleting a comma meant that I had something to do.

Do you get the point? Government agencies just go from year to year, increasing the wages, increasing the work-force, increasing the pensions. And deleting commas.

And they need more money. And the.politicians depend on the bureaucrats’ union to get out the vote. And so they need more taxes.

Now you understand why California has a billionaire’s unrealized assets tax on the ballot. And why Washington State is pushing an income tax and an estate tax.

And, by the way, as Sir Keir Starmer steps down an UK Prime Minister, he is said to have complained that he would pull the lever and nothing would happen. In Yes, Minister the joke was that the bureaucrats were a lot smarter than the politicians. Maybe not. But maybe they are powerful enough that they can ignore orders from the politicians, and get away with it.

And that's not even dealing with the fact, as I read the other day, that about 25 percent of the labor force in the US works for the government and about 15 percent more in government adjacent jobs.

Now I read a review of Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right by Laura K. Field.

Furious Minds opens with an epigraph intended to liken her subjects to Nazis, and the tone hardly lightens thereafter…
[Field] is especially animated whenever shades of the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt—who defined the political sphere as grounded in the distinction between friends and enemies—appear in a conservative author.

Writer Gregory Conti asks whether invoking the shade of “Nazi jurit Carl Schmitt” isn’t making Schmitt’s point. That “there is no politics without an enemy,” as Curtis Yarvin interprets him.

Field is a political theorist by training, so interpreting primary texts would be, one suspects, her forte. Where one might expect to find detailed exegesis, one often encounters either a testimonial from another commentator decrying the person in question as racist or misogynist, or an allegation of guilt by association along the lines that such-and-such figure quoted Carl Schmitt, or knew some unsavory white nationalist years prior.

Cue Sun Tzu about not knowing your enemy. Because our liberal friends do not get the point of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt in The Concept of the Political. That’s because they have merged the political and the moral and think, with Barack Obama, that they are bending the arc of history towards justice rather than merely beating on their enemies and gifting their friends.

I think that right now we hard-rightists are developing a pretty good ammunition depot with boxes and boxes of explosives about corruption, fraud, and the whole back-scratching NGO world. And the dysfunctional bureaucracy that orders the politicians to increase taxes.

It’s pretty obvious what is coming. Some intellectuals are going to get together a good narrative on the injustice of the current high tax low performance government. The next Trump, or next Trump but one, will match the ideas with his political genius.

And the world will change.

But it probably has to get worse before it gets better. My gut feeling is that we will need women to decide that the current regime does not protect them. Because “women expect to be protected.” And indeed that politics has never protected women. The only thing that really protects a woman is a husband.

Hey, I could be wrong!

| Tue, 23 Jun 2026 04:30:01 GMT |

Chris Chantrill

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US GOVERNMENT EXPENDITURE

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>>

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US GOVERNMENT RECEIPTS

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>>

UK PUBLIC EXPENDITURE

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>>

ROAD TO THE MIDDLE CLASS

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

Contents

Chapter One

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AN AMERICAN MANIFESTO

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

Contents

Chapter One

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