Former Congressman David Stockman also headed Reagan's Office of Management and Budget. Not of the Reagan White House Office, but the Office of the entire United States. Here's what he said about the failed budget negotiations:
"Fiscal governance in Washington is totally kaput. They never pass an annual budget resolution and enforcement plan, which was taken as a sacred duty back in the day; and there are never even annual appropriations bills for the mere 25% of the budget still subject to the Congressional “power of the purse”.
Instead, what occurs is a perennial string of short-term Continuing Resolutions (CRs) followed by an 11th hour, 3000 page pork-ridden “Omnibus Appropriations” bill that no one has read and which gives log-rolling (i.e. more domestic for more defense) a new definition.
In short, the debt ceiling was the only fiscal control mechanism left. And even that has been neutered time after time in the last decade by the hideous, flat-out lie that if the Treasury on any given day is one dollar short of being able to cover all of its due bills it must default on each and every one of them including interest payments, thereby destroying the credit of the United States. Yada, yada.
Finally, that lie was being put to the test and would have been eviscerated sometime next week. Yet after a lifetime on the public teat, Kevin McCarthy like his two GOP predecessors surrendered to the Doomsday Machine because he works for the GOP wing of the Swamp, not the voters, current and future.
And he did so while expectorating the most risible of lies: Republicans are changing the culture and trajectory of Washington—and we’re just getting started.
Not close. Not in the ballpark or even the catcher’s box behind home plate.
The deal does absolutely nothing to change the current “trajectory” toward fiscal disaster because it reduces nary a dime of built-in spending for defense, entitlements/mandatories, veterans and net interest, while those items account for 89% of the $80 trillion of built-in spending over the next decade."
That's China's vision, objective and immediate goal. They have the leverage to make it happen.
Summary of Xi's January 2026 announcement:
"It's a sweeping vision for building a global financial power organized around socialist principles, without the greed and without a financialization of the economy (what Xi calls 脱实向虚, “drifting from the real economy into the virtual”).
-- Arnaud Bertrand
The Florida legislature has begun to move legislation to enact their prior approval for gold and silver coins to be legal tender in Florida.
This legislation will exempt gold and silver coins from sales tax in Florida. It also means that within Florida, there will be a means of payment independent of digital money created by governments for the purpose of controlling the population, it’s behavior, and it’s expressed views, in order that governments can rule via official narratives.
As other states follow suit, interstate transactions can be executed in gold.
This 55-year-old patient underwent:
40+ emergency department visits
200+ specialist evaluations across 18 medical disciplines
100+ advanced laboratory investigations
100+ imaging and functional studies
Across multiple biospecimens (plasma, circulating exosomes, PBMCs, and skin tissue) and multiple independent laboratories, we detected:
Vaccine-derived spike mRNA sequences in circulating exosomes more than 3.5 years after the final injection
Plasmid DNA elements (including spike gene sequences, ori regions, and SV40 enhancer sequences) in skin tissue
Persistent spike protein in plasma, exosomes, monocyte subsets, and skin tissue. Here's the paper:
https://zenodo.org/records/18460099?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email