Kerby Anderson
Senator Rand Paul was on a TV interview with Larry Kudlow to talk about government spending. They began by acknowledging that we have a national debt of $36 trillion and a fiscal budget that needs to be brought under control.
Senator Paul believes the best benchmark is to only spend what comes into the federal treasury, but that hasn’t happened in decades. But he suggested that the first place to start would be to cut the hundreds of thousands of dollars allocated to study whether lonely rats use more cocaine than well-adjusted socialized rats. Or Senator Paul suggested we might cut the money allocated to study whether Japanese quail on cocaine are more sexually promiscuous. With a bit of sarcasm, he suggested there are a “few things we might be able to cut.”
Of course, these aren’t large cuts, which is why Larry Kudlow wanted to know if it were possible to save the money by not spending funds allocated but never used for COVID, or the Inflation Reduction Act, or even the CHIPS bill.
Senator Paul responded that there is a way to do this. It’s called recission. It was tried once in the Trump administration to send back $15 billion in unspent funds, but there were two Republicans who did not vote for it. He is convinced that perhaps now you could get 50 Republicans to vote for recission and cut $500 billion.
The other idea they discussed was impounding funds, but the Supreme Court ruled against President Nixon doing that. This current court might be willing to consider that process of impounding funds since it was done for more than a hundred years until the court ruled against Nixon in 1975.
There are ways to cut federal spending.

Kerby Anderson
In his last two presidential addresses, Joe Biden warned of the rise of oligarchs and the development of a tech-industrial complex. He reminded the nation of the farewell address of President Eisenhower, who spoke of a military industrial complex.
Noah Rothman observed that Democrats invented this “new bogeyman” only when some billionaires and Big Tech titans started to “support Republican politicians and their policy preferences.” He reminds us that Democrat leaders weren’t “all that vexed by ‘misinformation and disinformation’ when they were the ones improperly wielding the coercive power of the state.”
Victor Davis Hanson concluded that Biden’s attempt to copycat the warnings of Eisenhower failed because “to paraphrase a famous quip from 1988 Democratic vice-presidential candidate Lloyd Bentsen, ‘President Biden, you’re no Dwight Eisenhower.’”
He also reminds us that “until November 2024, Biden had no problems with oligarchs. In fact, he courted and used them. And they, in turn, eagerly donated lavishly to his agenda.” Meta/Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg did the bidding of the Biden campaign team in 2020 by pouring millions “into Biden-related PACs and voting groups to change voting laws.” In one of his last acts as president, Biden awarded George Soros with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Only now are these oligarchs dangerous because some voted for Trump, and a few will be working with the new administration. Big Tech has been guilty of censoring speech and promoting disinformation, but the former president and his party only noticed the problem when they were no longer in charge.