RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/05/03/despite-what-youve-heard-trumps-budget-doesnt-slash-sending-it-barely-trims-it/

President Donald Trump did something extremely rare in Washington on Friday. He offered a budget plan that proposes actual, honest-to-goodness cuts in spending next year. Which helps explain the hysterical reaction from the usual suspects.

Normally, White House budget proposals claim to be cutting spending when all they are doing is slowing the growth in spending. Or they promise spending cuts far down the road while boosting outlays in the short term.

But the budget outline Trump released Friday does none of that. In sticking with Trump’s “revolution of common sense,” when it says it cuts spending, it cuts spending – meaning spending less next year than this year.

Trump wants to reduce spending on domestic programs by $163 billion next year – which would be almost 23% less than the federal government will spend this year on things such as education, the environment, energy, transportation, foreign aid.

So, it’s not surprising to see headlines that scream that Trump’s is a “scorched earth” plan that “slashes spending,” makes “drastic cuts,” and – our favorite headline from the New York Times – proposes “Slashing Domestic Spending to the Lowest Level of the Modern Era.”

Right now, reporters are scouring the country for examples they can trot out – or invent – of how these spending cuts will harm children, gut scientific research and throw people on the streets.

But, while we commend Trump for proposing deep cuts this year – and for laying out in plain English what he wants to cut and why – let’s not get carried away. What he’s proposing is far from “drastic.”

If Trump got his way – which is doubtful considering how weak-kneed Republicans in Congress are when it comes to spending cuts – his plan would simply remove the massive increase in spending that happened during and after COVID.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/05/02/mining-our-own-business/

Rare earth elements are crucial to our modern existence, as well as our advanced defense systems. China, America’s primary supplier of these metals, has restricted exports of rare earths into the U.S. in retaliation for the president’s tariffs on Chinese exports into the country. There’s no reason to panic, though. There’s a way to work around the problem, and it doesn’t require a minerals deal with Ukraine.

Rare earth elements are needed to make our cellphones, computer hard drives, flat-screen monitors and televisions, as well as life-saving medical equipment. They are in fact “indispensable metals in electronics manufacturing.” Without them, modern society simply cannot survive. Even renewable energy sources, so precious to green zealots, need rare earths.  

There are also “significant defense applications,” says the U.S. Geological Survey, including “electronic displays, guidance systems, lasers, and radar and sonar systems.”

Despite their importance to our economy and security, our “leaders” have put us in an awkward position. China provides the U.S. with 70% of the rare earth compounds we buy from abroad.

As their name implies, supplies are scarce. because they can’t be found “in high concentrations in the earth’s crust” and when they are discovered, the process to separate them from other resources is typically arduous. 

But the process is not beyond the U.S.

This country could have – and should have – been mining large volumes of its own rare earths. But environmental zealots have blocked mining efforts, including the planned Pebble Mine in Alaska, “home to at least 70 known occurrences of rare earth elements.” It was shut down in 2014 even before the partnership applied for federal approval. The Environmental Protection Agency “decided to kill this project before any science had been done,” Tom Collier, who was the project’s chief executive, told John Stossel. 

https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/01/the-trump-counterrevolution-and-the-moral-ledger/

Despite the media hysteria, Trump’s counterrevolution remains on course.

Its ultimate fate will probably rest with the state of the economy by the November 2026 midterm elections. But its success also hinges on accomplishing what is right and long overdue—and then making such reforms quietly, compassionately, and methodically.

No country can long endure without sovereignty and security—or with 10 to 12 million illegal immigrants crossing the border and half a million criminal foreign nationals roaming freely.

The prior administration found that it was easy to destroy the border and welcome the influx. But it is far harder for its successor to restore security, find those who broke the law, and insist on legal-only immigration. Trump is on the right side of all these issues and making substantial progress.

Everyone knew that a $2 trillion budget deficit, a $37 trillion national debt, and a $1.2 trillion trade deficit in goods were ultimately unsustainable.

Yet all prior politicians of the 21st century winced at the mere thought of reducing debts and deficits, given that it proved much easier just to print and spread around federal money. As long as the Trump administration dutifully cuts the budget, sends its regrets to displaced federal employees, seeks to expand private sector reemployment, and quietly presses ahead, it retains the moral high ground.

The elite universities have long hidden things from the American people that otherwise would have lost them all public support.

They deliberately sought to neuter Supreme Court rulings banning race-based preferences by stealthily continuing their often-segregated policies on campuses, from admissions and hiring to dorms and graduations.

They have taken billions of dollars from autocracies, such as communist China and Qatar. And they have partnered abroad with their foreign illiberal institutions and then disguised their quid pro quo subservience.