Common Sense with Paul Jacob

Update

No Trillion Dollar Deficits!

Post author By Redactor
Post date September 12, 2026
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“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.

Thought

Mencken

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).

Today

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.

crime and punishment Fourth Amendment rights general freedom ideological culture too much government

I Spy vs. They Spy

There is an argument making the rounds: Flock cameras are good because cop cams have proven themselves so useful. More transparency!

Flock cameras, you may remember, are the traffic cameras integrally linked to an artificial intelligence that tracks car license plates (and thus the cars, and drivers) that come within the cameras’ field of vision.

The company contracts with cities and other governments. To surveil us.

You know, “to protect us from crime.”

The fear — and I know it, because I fear it — is that this will lead to a total surveillance state where “innocent until proven guilty” has no real meaning. Watched and analyzed, our every action on the roads and sidewalks would potentially become ensnared in Big Brother tyranny.

A somewhat secondary fear is that police and other government workers — or hackers — would be able to access the database/a.i. for reasons of an, uh, extra-legal character.

And that has happened aplenty!

The latest tale comes from Sussex, Wisconsin, where our “public servants” tracked a specific person — Napoleon Jones, a Navy Veteran — after he had recorded a traffic stop that “just didn’t feel right” and had then been arrested and (understandably) filed a complaint.

While it is legal to record a public traffic stop, for some reason cops really don’t like “civilians” to record them.

In the course of reviewing the complaints, Jones’s lawyer discovered that the police had been tracking him through the Flock system.

Before you shout the now common protest of “What the Flock,” remember what we are up against: government workers using the system to defend their own misbehavior.

This is not the transparency we were looking for.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Flock, police, privacy, surveillance, traffic

Thought

John Taylor

The appearance of virtue may be useful to the guilty; but it is less useful than virtue itself, and is frequently a snare to others.
John Taylor of Caroline, An Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States (Fredericksburg, VA.: Green and Cady, 1814).

Today

Alexander Hamilton

On September 11, 1789, Alexander Hamilton was appointed the first United States Secretary of the Treasury.

The date marks quite a few other, perhaps more memorable, events, too. But few Cabinet selections were more consequential to United States history than President George Washington’s appointment of Hamilton.

Accountability free trade & free markets international affairs

Reciprocal Rip-Offs?

Trump, free trade, protectionism, tariffs,

Making sense of the U.S. president’s trade-deal talk has always been difficult.

What is he really up to?

Most of the time President Trump talks protectionist, like a high-tariff man. Other times, he seems to be demanding reciprocal free trade.

Now, the classic free-market economics position is that unilateral free trade is better than managed, high-tariff trading regimes. But Trump never sounds forthright like an actual free trader.

Instead, he says stuff like “Canada has been ripping us off for years.” Classic protectionist jibber-jabber. When we buy and they sell, and vice versa, barring fraud, it is not a rip-off.

Mr. Trump posted the “rip-off” comment Tuesday. While using the word “reciprocity,” he is talking about government procurement programs, claiming that “what many do not realize is that the Canadian Government, including Canadian Provinces, have banned American Small Businesses and Companies from selling into their Government Procurement Markets. This is the case even though Canada gets broad access into the massive American Government Procurement Market, including those of our States. That is not reciprocity, it is a Canadian Trade Scam. From now on, NO RECIPROCITY — NO ACCESS!”

This was to announce a new retaliatory effort after ongoing trade negotiations broke down, both sides having immediately erected tariff barriers — and worse (the U.S. forbidding one Canadian airplane company from selling in the U.S. at all). “President Donald Trump directed the General Services Administration (GSA) on Tuesday to take steps to remove Canadian-origin products from a Multiple Award Schedule that accounts for more than $50 billion a year in transactions,” The Epoch Times explains.

This is not the reciprocity we were looking for.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags free trade, protectionism, tariffs, Trump

Common Sense

Alexander Hamilton

A nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one.
Alexander Hamilton, letter to The Daily Advertiser (February 21, 1797).

Today

Missing Money

On September 10, 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld gave a speech about an “adversary that poses a serious threat to the United States of America.” Describing it as “one of the last bastions of central planning,” he said it “governs by dictating five year plans” and that “with brutal consistency it stifles free thought and crushes new ideas.”

The adversary? “The Pentagon bureaucracy — not the people, but the processes.” And he went on to state that the Pentagon could not account for more than $2.3 trillion.

The next day, the twin towers of the World Trade Center fell, along with Building No. 7 of that complex, after those two major towers were hit with commandeered jet airliners. And the Pentagon was also hit with a major explosion. It just so happened that Rumsfeld’s big news was drowned out by the story of terrorism.

Today