This week Germany has begun deploying troops to the Baltic state of Lithuania, which marks the first such external deployment of its kind for Germany's military since World War II — and which is the result of Berlin adopting a firmer 'counter-Russia' posture after more than two years of war in Ukraine. 

While merely two dozen soldiers have reportedly arrived Lithuania thus far, the German contingent will be stationed there permanently. Currently Germany leads a NATO deployment in Lithuania of some 1,000 troops, but which is temporary.

Via AP

"This is the first time that we have permanently stationed such a unit outside of Germany," German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said during a ceremony seeing the troops depart from Berlin. He hailed it as "an important day for the German army."

Crucially, and sure to trigger deep alarm for Moscow, the permanent German force in Lithuania is slated to grow to 4,800 by the year 2027. 

German military leadership is touting this as in direct response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine and 'aggression':

Russia's invasion of Ukraine is prompting Germany to do something unprecedented — to permanently base thousands of troops only about 100 kilometers from the border with Russia and right in the line of fire if the Kremlin ever launches an attack on NATO territory.

German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius was in Vilnius on Monday to sign a deal with his Lithuanian counterpart Arvydas Anušauskas firming up the conditions on which 4,800 German troops plus 200 civilians will be based in the Baltic country.

"With this war-ready brigade, we are assuming a leadership responsibility here in the alliance and on NATO's eastern flank," Pistorius said, adding: "The speed of the project clearly shows that Germany understood the new security reality."

What is alarming for the significant risk of direct escalation between Russia and NATO with this new German deployment is the geography of this Baltic neighborhood: Lithuania shares a border with the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad.

This puts a permanent deployment of troops from a NATO country directly on Russia's borders. Additionally, Lithuania also borders Belarus, which forms a 'Union state' with Russia and currently hosts Russian tactical nuclear weapons. All of this comes as France's Macron has been talking up the possibility of sending Western troops directly to Ukraine.

Via BBC

Germany has already sent Leopard 2 main battle tanks to Ukraine, which have by many accounts done nothing to sway the momentum of the battle in Kiev's favor. Instead, Russia has in the recent past published footage purporting to show several German-supplied tanks disabled and destroyed, burning on the battlefield.

Authored by John & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

The government wants your money.

It will beg, steal or borrow if necessary, but it wants your money any way it can get it.

This is what comes of those $1.2 trillion spending bills: someone’s got to foot the bill for the government’s fiscal insanity, and that “someone” is the U.S. taxpayer.

The government’s schemes to swindle, cheat, scam, and generally defraud taxpayers of their hard-earned dollars have run the gamut from wasteful pork barrel legislation, cronyism and graft to asset forfeiture, costly stimulus packages, and a national security complex that continues to undermine our freedoms while failing to making us any safer.

Americans have also been made to pay through the nose for the government’s endless wars, subsidization of foreign nations, military empire, welfare state, roads to nowhere, bloated workforce, secret agencies, fusion centers, private prisons, biometric databases, invasive technologies, arsenal of weapons, and every other budgetary line item that is contributing to the fast-growing wealth of the corporate elite at the expense of those who are barely making ends meet—that is, we the taxpayers.

According to the number crunchers with the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, in order to spend money it doesn’t have on programs it can’t afford, the government is borrowing roughly $6 billion a day.

Basically, the U.S. government is funding its existence with a credit card.

Let’s talk numbers, shall we?

The national debt (the amount the federal government has borrowed over the years and must pay back) is more than $34 trillion and will grow another $19 trillion by 2033.

The bulk of that debt has been amassed over the past two decades, thanks in large part to the fiscal shenanigans of four presidents, 10 sessions of Congress and two wars.

It’s estimated that the amount this country owes is now 130% greater than its gross domestic product (all the products and services produced in one year by labor and property supplied by the citizens).

In other words, the government is spending more than it brings in.

The U.S. ranks as the 12th most indebted nation in the world, with much of that debt owed to the Federal Reserve, large investment funds and foreign governments, namely, Japan and China.

Interest payments on the national debt are more than $395 billion, which is significantly more than the government spends on veterans’ benefits and services, and according to Pew Research Center, more than it will spend on elementary and secondary education, disaster relief, agriculture, science and space programs, foreign aid, and natural resources and environmental protection combined.

According to the Committee for a Reasonable Federal Budget, the interest we’ve paid on this borrowed money is “nearly twice what the federal government will spend on transportation infrastructure, over four times as much as it will spend on K-12 education, almost four times what it will spend on housing, and over eight times what it will spend on science, space, and technology.”

In ten years, those interest payments will exceed our entire military budget.

This is financial tyranny.

We’ve been sold a bill of goods by politicians promising to pay down the national debt, jumpstart the economy, rebuild our infrastructure, secure our borders, ensure our security, and make us all healthy, wealthy and happy.

None of that has come to pass, and yet we’re still being loaded down with debt not of our own making while the government remains unrepentant, unfazed and undeterred in its wanton spending.

Indeed, the national deficit (the difference between what the government spends and the revenue it takes in) remains at more than $1.5 trillion.

If Americans managed their personal finances the way the government mismanages the nation’s finances, we’d all be in debtors’ prison by now.

Despite the government propaganda being peddled by the politicians and news media, however, the government isn’t spending our tax dollars to make our lives better.

We’re being robbed blind so the governmental elite can get richer.

In the eyes of the government, “we the people, the voters, the consumers, and the taxpayers” are little more than pocketbooks waiting to be picked.

“We the people” have become the new, permanent underclass in America.

Consider: The government can seize your home and your car (which you’ve bought and paid for) over nonpayment of taxes. Government agents can freeze and seize your bank accounts and other valuables if they merely “suspect” wrongdoing. And the IRS insists on getting the first cut of your salary to pay for government programs over which you have no say.

We have no real say in how the government runs, or how our taxpayer funds are used, but we’re being forced to pay through the nose, anyhow.

We have no real say, but that doesn’t prevent the government from fleecing us at every turn and forcing us to pay for endless wars that do more to fund the military industrial complex than protect us, pork barrel projects that produce little to nothing, and a police state that serves only to imprison us within its walls.

If you have no choice, no voice, and no real options when it comes to the government’s claims on your property and your money, you’re not free.

It wasn’t always this way, of course.

Early Americans went to war over the inalienable rights described by philosopher John Locke as the natural rights of life, liberty and property.

It didn’t take long, however—a hundred years, in fact—before the American government was laying claim to the citizenry’s property by levying taxes to pay for the Civil War. As the New York Times reports, “Widespread resistance led to its repeal in 1872.”

Determined to claim some of the citizenry’s wealth for its own uses, the government reinstituted the income tax in 1894. Charles Pollock challenged the tax as unconstitutional, and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in his favor. Pollock’s victory was relatively short-lived. Members of Congress—united in their determination to tax the American people’s income—worked together to adopt a constitutional amendment to overrule the Pollock decision.

On the eve of World War I, in 1913, Congress instituted a permanent income tax by way of the 16th Amendment to the Constitution and the Revenue Act of 1913. Under the Revenue Act, individuals with income exceeding $3,000 could be taxed starting at 1% up to 7% for incomes exceeding $500,000.

It’s all gone downhill from there.

Unsurprisingly, the government has used its tax powers to advance its own imperialistic agendas and the courts have repeatedly upheld the government’s power to penalize or jail those who refused to pay their taxes.

While we’re struggling to get by, and making tough decisions about how to spend what little money actually makes it into our pockets after the federal, state and local governments take their share (this doesn’t include the stealth taxes imposed through tolls, fines and other fiscal penalties), the government continues to do whatever it likes—levy taxes, rack up debt, spend outrageously and irresponsibly—with little thought for the plight of its citizens.

To top it all off, all of those wars the U.S. is so eager to fight abroad are being waged with borrowed funds. As The Atlantic reports, “U.S. leaders are essentially bankrolling the wars with debt, in the form of purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds by U.S.-based entities like pension funds and state and local governments, and by countries like China and Japan.”

Of course, we’re the ones who have to repay that borrowed debt.

For instance, American taxpayers have been forced to shell out more than $5.6 trillion since 9/11 for the military industrial complex’s costly, endless so-called “war on terrorism.” That translates to roughly $23,000 per taxpayer to wage wars abroad, occupy foreign countries, provide financial aid to foreign allies, and fill the pockets of defense contractors and grease the hands of corrupt foreign dignitaries.

Mind you, that’s only a portion of what the Pentagon spends on America’s military empire.

The United States also spends more on foreign aid than any other nation, with nearly $300 billion disbursed over a five-year period. More than 150 countries around the world receive U.S. taxpayer-funded assistance, with most of the funds going to the Middle East, Africa and Asia. That price tag keeps growing, too.

As Forbes reports, “U.S. foreign aid dwarfs the federal funds spent by 48 out of 50 state governments annually. Only the state governments of California and New York spent more federal funds than what the U.S. sent abroad each year to foreign countries.”

Most recently, the U.S. has allocated nearly $115 billion in emergency military and humanitarian aid for Ukraine since the start of the Russia invasion.

As Dwight D. Eisenhower warned in a 1953 speech, this is how the military industrial complex continues to get richer, while the American taxpayer is forced to pay for programs that do little to enhance our lives, ensure our happiness and well-being, or secure our freedoms.

This is no way of life.

Yet it’s not just the government’s endless wars that are bleeding us dry.

We’re also being forced to shell out money for surveillance systems to track our movements, money to further militarize our already militarized police, money to allow the government to raid our homes and bank accounts, money to fund schools where our kids learn nothing about freedom and everything about how to comply, and on and on.

There was a time in our history when our forebears said “enough is enough” and stopped paying their taxes to what they considered an illegitimate government. They stood their ground and refused to support a system that was slowly choking out any attempts at self-governance, and which refused to be held accountable for its crimes against the people. Their resistance sowed the seeds for the revolution that would follow.

Unfortunately, in the 200-plus years since we established our own government, we’ve let bankers, corporate turncoats and number-crunching bureaucrats muddy the waters and pilfer the accounts to such an extent that we’re back where we started.

Once again, we’ve got a despotic regime with an imperial ruler doing as they please.

Once again, we’ve got a judicial system insisting we have no rights under a government which demands that the people march in lockstep with its dictates.

And once again, we’ve got to decide whether we’ll keep marching or break stride and make a turn toward freedom.

But what if we didn’t just pull out our pocketbooks and pony up to the federal government’s outrageous demands for more money?

What if we didn’t just dutifully line up to drop our hard-earned dollars into the collection bucket, no questions asked about how it will be spent?

What if, instead of quietly sending in our tax checks, hoping vainly for some meager return, we did a little calculating of our own and started deducting from our taxes those programs that we refuse to support?

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we’re no longer living the American dream.

We’re living a financial nightmare.

Authored by 'Dalwhinnie' via BombThrower.com,

It’s no longer about markets. It’s about identity.

The historian Prof. Gary Gerstle maintained that the neo liberal order was coming to an end, that free movement of goods, money, ideas and talent characterized the neo liberal order and that it was in the process of losing ascendancy. Losing ascendancy does not mean disappearing, it means losing ascendancy. Peter Zeihan says much the same and locates the issue in the guarantee offered by the US Navy since WW2 to police the sea lanes of the world. Also large diesel engines and cheap fuel may have as much to do with trade as any deliberate policy measures. I digress.

Somewhat to my surprise I agreed with the leftist professor of history.

So far so good. I have ordered his book and will read it skeptically. (The Rise and Fall of the Neo-Liberal Order).

The neo liberal order got going about the time of Reagan and Thatcher and was characterized by reliance upon, and praise for, the market. In the period under discussion, various US Presidents, of whom Clinton is prominent, also pursued neo liberal promarket policies. This illustrates the tendency for large movements of policy to continue despite changes in the party holding the presidency. Canada obtained free trade with the US, and many liberalizing trade measures were adopted throughout this period roughly 1970-2000.

The next assertion of the professor was that the dominance of neo liberalism was coming to an end. I also agree with that assertion, perhaps for different reasons than those of the learned professor.

The effects of the neo liberal order were various and I shall try to point out the major features. This is obviously me talking, not Professor Gerstle.

• off shoring of domestic North American manufacturing, which led to the gutting of manufacturing towns, increasing despair and drug addictions (viz Angus Deaton on deaths of despair in the working class) and much cheaper goods at the stores

• Industrialization of much of the rest of the world. When did you first notice that clothing you wore came from Cambodia, Indonesia, or Vietnam?

• Very significant increase of the national share of wealth to the top 1% and eventually the top 1% of the 1% as the economy became more monetary and intangible and less a matter of things produced. Software firms worth more than Boeing or Ford for instance.

• Oxycontin plagues and mass drug addictions

• Very high rates of non white immigration of peoples to Europe and North America. You are not supposed to notice this, by the way. But assimilation is not proceeding too well in many European countries and the same process is well underway in the United States.

The remainder of Professor Gerstle’s talk concerned Trump, Orban and Bolsonaro and the supposed authoritarianism of same and the threat to democracy. I should say “democracy” because clearly the word has become code for something other than changes of governments in a populist direction. These are held to be threats to “democracy” which seem to consist of changes of history of which leftists disapprove.

Here is where I depart from Professor Gerstle’s alarmism about populist changes to governments.

He was also concerned with the January 6th insurrection on the hill and the menace it portended to the continuity of American institutions. I was once very alarmed by January 6th riots until I began to believe the entire event was a police -infiltrated and significantly police-inspired stunt to disgrace Trump. It has worked.

Prof. Gerstle along with many other Democrats believes that democracy is under attack.

Let me try to set forth the reasoning of many on the Trumpist right, if “right” is the term to be applied. Here we get to territory that will summon forth political disagreement.

For many of us, a combination of events has persuaded us that democracy is already in grave danger from the following, which is largely drawn from the US experience.

• A politicized leftist judiciary and prosecutorial apparatus

• A politicized federal police

• A politicized intelligence apparatus

• An almost certainly manipulated if not stolen presidential election

• Uncontrolled immigration of people, some of whom are in the United States with subversive intentions

• The immigration of 20 or 40 millions is not being controlled because the Democrats want to achieve permanent electoral supremacy by endowing the illegals with votes

• A minor but serious plague has been used as a pretext for a massive repression of personal liberties both of trade and movement on the basis of compulsory vaccination by radical mRNA therapies that have been insufficiently tested, and which appear to be causing a serious increase of deaths in the general population

• which plague was engineered by experiments in gain of function (increased lethality) research funded by US sources in Chinese laboratories (RFK I pushing these buttons as a central part of his electoral campaign)

• A push by all global leaders and bureaucracies to reduce energetic throughputs, the basis of wealth creation, in the name of a spurious climate agenda.

• A fundamental attack on sex roles being carried on as the focus of the next personal liberation struggle.

So yes, the people, rightly or wrongly, are unhappy with the state of their governments and what these governments have so clearly indicated they wish to do.

Consequently, as a result of governments being so badly misaligned with their electorates, and so apparently ready to call opposition to their intentions as “far right” “fascist” “transphobic”, and so ready to denigrate the white settler populations of which the electorate is still mostly composed, the neo liberal order is coming to an end. This is occurring not because of trade issues, or income inequality, but because of fundamental challenges posed by left wing governments to the people who still compose the electorates.

To what do we belong? To the nation, or to various sexual and cultural minorities?

Trump has a clear answer. Biden, if he has an answer at all, says that most Americans belong to an illegitimate race. And if he cannot say this, his minions state it or insinuate it.

The neo liberal order is coming to an end because the issues have decisively moved on from trade and markets to identity and belonging.

*  *  *

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Authored by Jane L. Johnson via The Mises Institute,

Utility bills - for electricity, natural gas, water, and garbage - have by long-standing tradition been based on customer usage, measured in kilowatt-hours of electricity, therms or Btu of natural gas, hundred cubic feet of water, or number of garbage cans.

Every residence and business has electric, gas, and water meters that measure utility usage.

But changes are afoot in the utility business as federal and state governments urge Americans to convert from fossil fuels to electricity for home heating, appliances, and transportation. From this transition will undoubtedly follow changes in utility rate-setting models.

Fixed Fees Coupled with Usage-Based Electricity Rates

Some electric utilities currently charge customers a flat, fixed fee as well as usage-based charges, both on the same monthly bill. The fixed fees, often called “customer charges” or “meter-reading charges,” are imposed irrespective of energy usage. These fees assure revenue stability and offset the overhead expenses of running electric utilities. Energy usage-based charges, which can vary seasonally, are designed (and regulated) to recover the cost of the electricity sold.

Economists refer to this pricing strategy as a two-part tariff in which the consumer must pay a fixed fee for the right to buy a product or service (energy in the case of electric utilities). This pricing model effectively maximizes revenue for sellers that have some monopoly pricing power in their respective markets because of the way they have structured their businesses. Electric utilities are, of course, regulated monopolies that serve designated geographic areas.

Other Examples of Two-Part Tariff Pricing Strategy

• Disneyland charges high entrance fees to its theme parks, but prices for individual rides are just sufficiently high to cover the marginal cost of operating the rides. A family that has traveled from Kansas to California or Florida Disney venues will likely not balk at paying high admission fees combined with low per-ride ticket prices.

• Popular retailer Costco charges annual membership dues that allow customers to buy large product packages at relatively low unit prices. While Costco isn’t strictly considered a monopoly among warehouse stores, its unique membership and marketing methods effectively give it monopoly status with great cachet.

• Country clubs typically charge high membership fees that offer members the right to buy greens fees and participate in social activities with other like-minded, equally affluent members.

• Bars levy admission cover charges combined with fees per drink once patrons are inside.

The strategy works when sellers can easily identify different buyer groups and prohibit individual buyers from selling to nonmember buyers.

For example, country club members cannot resell greens fees or social activities to nonmembers. Disneyland visitors cannot resell ride tickets to those who have not paid the entrance fee. And electric utility ratepayers cannot resell to others who don’t have accounts with the utility.

Income-Based Fixed Charges

But what if utilities based their fixed fee on customers’ income levels rather than a flat uniform fee for every customer?

California, home to 10 percent of the total US population and often considered a state laboratory where policies begin before adoption across the nation, offers a glimpse into the future of utility rate setting as the two-part tariff pricing model has now taken on a new wrinkle.

In 2022 the supermajority Democrat state legislature passed and the governor signed Assembly Bill 205 (AB 205), which ordered the California Public Utilities Commission to authorize a “fixed charge” on residential electric bills by July 2024. Customers of the three large investor-owned utilities (IOUs)—Pacific Gas and Electric Company, Southern California Edison, and San Diego Gas and Electric—would pay this charge regardless of their electricity usage and in addition to that usage. The basis of the fixed charge is to be determined by each IOU utility, subject to approval by the California Public Utilities Commission.

The legislation also required the utilities to reduce their rates for electricity usage in order to assist low-income customers as electricity prices continue to rise. This represents not only a major shift in the standard rate-setting model from usage orientation to fixed charges but also a new emphasis on income and wealth redistribution from high-income customers to low-income, somewhat akin to a progressive income tax.

There is no precedent for such redistribution in utility rate regulation.

AB 205 was intended to ensure that the IOUs’ new two-part pricing strategy be revenue-neutral - that is, continue to make sufficient revenue to invest in needed infrastructure for long-distance transmission (picture large pylons across the landscape) and distribution (local power lines delivering power to retail customers). The three IOUs own the vast majority of California’s energy infrastructure (poles and wires), construction and maintenance of which are so vital to greater electrification of homes and transportation as California focuses on transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable energy.

A further intent of the legislation, moreover, was to raise additional revenue to pay for burying power lines that might otherwise ignite wildfires and constructing facilities to carry solar and wind-generated energy to large urban areas. Higher-income customers would pay a disproportionately high share of these construction and maintenance costs, even if they don’t use more power.

It all sounded like a win-win for progressives:

Rich people pay more for energy, poor people pay less, and everyone makes progress on global warming.

Until, that is, questions arose on possible fallout from this new rate-setting model:

How to determine ratepayers’ income levels without invading their privacy?

How might higher income-based fixed charges, coupled with lower kilowatt-hours usage rates, reduce financial incentives to conserve energy usage?

How might lower usage rates affect desirable future sales of rooftop solar installation?

Because of these imponderables and because the California Public Utilities Commission has not approved any of several possible methodologies to implement AB 205, one legislator has now introduced Assembly Bill 1999 to repeal the fixed-charge mandate. Another legislator who voted for AB 205 now confesses that the legislation was long and confusing and was called up for a vote very shortly after its text was available to read.

Blame is being passed around.

Is the original AB 205 merely a profit-grab by the three large IOUs? Were legislators remiss in approving it too quickly in their zeal to mandate climate goals? Who originally decided to incorporate the income-based fixed charge into the legislation?

Addressing these questions may be a challenge, something akin to solving an algebraic problem with more variables than equations, which leaves only an indeterminate solution. Too many conditions must be satisfied: revenue neutrality, protecting customer privacy when determining their income levels, energy usage rates low enough to protect low-income customers, usage rates high enough to encourage energy conservation and future installation of rooftop solar, sufficient revenue to invest in infrastructure for wildfire prevention, and additional grid capacity to support electric vehicle recharging stations and home heat pumps.

It is possible to solve such problems using linear programming, maximizing a linear function subject to the various constraints. But it is unlikely that California Public Utilities Commission staff could grapple with such a solution in time to approve income-based electric utility two-part tariffs in time for July 2024 implementation.

Whether this two-part tariff income-based pricing model might migrate to utilities in other states is unclear at this point, but its success or failure in California will probably determine its ultimate fate. In the meantime, perhaps the original legislation AB 205 is so poorly written that it should be repealed outright, consigning another well-intentioned governmental intervention effort to the proverbial dustbin of history.

A new poll from Rasmussen finds that 54% of likely voters believe Joe Biden to be "encouraging" illegal aliens to enter the United States in order to "create a permanent majority" for the Democrats, the National Pulse reports.

According to the poll, 43% "strongly agree" that the border crisis is being facilitated for political advantage, while 14% "somewhat agree." 29% "strongly disagree," while 8% "somewhat disagree."

Hispanic voters, despite having leaned Democrat in every general and midterm election since 1980, are actually more likely to believe Biden is exploiting illegal immigration than any other ethnic group. Forty-eight percent strongly agree this is what the Democrat leader is doing, and 20 percent somewhat agree for a combined 68 percent. This compares to 17 percent who strongly disagree and seven percent who somewhat disagree.

A combined 54 percent of white voters agree Biden is trying to create a permanent majority, and a plurality of 47 percent of black voters agree. -National Pulse

Meanwhile 36% of self-identified moderates believe Biden is trying to create a permanent majority, as do 36% of Democrats.

In February, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas claimed that the Biden administration doesn't bear responsibility for the border crisis, despite, among other things:

• Terminating the National Emergency at the Southwest border
• Revoking a Trump-era Executive Order that was designed to ensure there was meaningful enforcement of U.S. immigration laws.
• Issuing an executive order protecting DACA recipients
• Unveiling the U.S. Citizenship Act, which would provide amnesty to millions of illegal aliens in the U.S., demonstrating intent to reward illegal border crossers with a path to citizenship.
• Announcing a 100-day moratorium on deportations and immigration enforcement, effectively providing amnesty to criminal and other removable aliens

 (It's a really long list...)

And since Biden was sworn in as president in January 2021, there have been at least 10 million illegals who have entered the United States, while the government deals with a backlog of more than 3 million asylum cases in US courts.

"Do you bear responsibility for what is happening at the border?"

MAYORKAS: "We don't bear responsibility" pic.twitter.com/rCdwOIAIAX

We're sure Congressional Republicans will have all sort of nice things to say about immigration when we get to the amnesty phase of the operation.