If Poverty is the Mother of Crimes, want of Sense is the Father.
Jean De La Bruyère, The Characters; or, Manners of the Present Age (Henri Van Laun, translator, 1885), Vol. II, Ch. II.
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La Bruyère
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The State Department
September 15, 1789, the United States “Department of Foreign Affairs,” established by law in July, was renamed the Department of State and assigned a variety of domestic duties. Thomas Jefferson was the the department’s first secretary.
“If the Republicans win, you win with us, and you get $5,000,” President Donald Trump promised last week before assembled Republicans at the party’s midterm convention as well as a national television audience. “It will be called the Trump dividend.”
The cost of making good on his pledge, bribe, deal? A cool $1.3 trillion.
I don’t believe Mr. Trump has that much money.
“Because of our tremendous strength and success economically, I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000,” intoned the president. “Very much like a successful company will do a cash distribution to its shareholders.”
Dividends are paid out of profits; this operation known as the federal government doesn’t turn a profit. Instead, it’s running past $40 trillion
Can we afford to go trillions further into the red? Or pay more in taxes for this additional trillion-dollar-plus giveaway?
As if trying to outdo the president in folly, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick declared “we’re going to deliver” but “not from taxpayer money,” detailing several precarious plans . . . to come up with less than half the needed dough.
On Fox News, Bret Baier brought the vice president into the conversation. J. D. Vance described the current deficit budget in terms of revenue — there is “an extraordinary amount of revenue,” he said — as if the revenue that is not extraordinary enough to cover all current spending is somehow enough to spend $1.3 trillion more without additional debt.
Eric Boehm at Reason says the $5,000 bribe shows that MAGA has run out of ideas.
In an election year when Democrats are featuring wannabe communists, why are Republicans demonstrating a similar lack of sanity?
I think the American voter might be more persuaded by even the smallest dose of common sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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John Taylor
Experience has demonstrated over and over again, that a free government cannot subsist in union with extravagance, heavy taxation, exclusive privileges, or with any established process by which a great amount of property is annually transferred to unproductive employments. Such a system is tyranny. How then can it harmonise or live in the same country with liberty? But liberty is always addressed by it, as if she was vain, foolish, and even blind; as if she was only fortune. A free government can only be made lasting by frugality and justice.
John Taylor of Caroline, Tyranny Unmasked (1821), Section III.
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Death of a President
On September 14, 1901, U.S. President William McKinley died after suffering eight days from a gunshot wound. Anarchist Leon Czolgosz, the shooter, was executed on October 29 of that year. McKinley’s successor was his vice president, Theodore Roosevelt, sworn in on the day of McKinley’s death, September Fourteenth.
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George Jean Nathan
No man can think clearly when his fists are clenched.
George Jean Nathan, The Smart Set (August 1922).
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Calvin Returned
John Calvin returned to Geneva on September 13, 1541, after three years of exile. His subsequent work in church reform and theology became known as Calvinism, and profoundly influenced the course of European and (eventually) American culture, including several concepts of servitude and liberty.
On the same date in 1989, Desmond Tutu led South Africa’s largest march aganst Apartheid.
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No Trillion Dollar Deficits!
“The U.S. budget deficit inched closer to $2 trillion after the first 11 months of fiscal year 2026, the Treasury Department reported on Sept. 11.” So begins an article by Andrew Moran, published today in The Epoch Times.
Overall, the fiscal year-to-date budget deficit totaled $1.97 trillion, almost $200 billion higher than the same 11-month span in the prior fiscal year.
Tax receipts were $360 billion last month, bringing this fiscal year’s total to nearly $4.9 trillion. This was slightly lower than the $5.2 trillion posted during the same 11-month span in fiscal year 2025.
Federal spending slowed to $527 billion, with Social Security being the top budgetary item ($141 billion). This was followed by net interest payments ($86 billion), healthcare ($81 billion), and national defense ($72 billion).
Debt-servicing payments overtook Medicare as the federal government’s second-largest fiscal year-to-date expenditure, exceeding $1 trillion in August.
Andrew Moran, “US Budget Deficit Nears $2 Trillion Amid Bond Market Jitters,” The Epoch Times (September 12, 2026).
The largest federal annual deficit in history was $3.1 trillion, recorded in the 2020 budget year. That was the first year of the Covid lockdowns and bailouts.
Socialism is the theory that the desire of one man to get something he hasn’t got is more pleasing to a just God than the desire of some other man to keep what he has got.
H. L. Mencken, A Little Book in C Major (1916).
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Switzerland
On September 12, 1848, Switzerland — known by endonyms Schweizerische Eidgenoßenschaft (German), Confédération suisse (French), Confederazione Svizzera (Italian), Confederaziun svizra (Romansh), Confoederatio helvetica (Latin) — became a unified federal state with a constitution limiting central government powers and providing decentralized state (canton) power patterned on the U.S. Constitution.