Blog

How Much Smaller Is the Chinese Economy Than the U.S.?

The U.S. economy is $11.2 trillion larger than China’s. The average American is roughly six times richer than the average PRC citizen. At China’s claimed 5% annual growth rate, which is likely inflated, it would take approximately 30 years of uninterrupted expansion for China to reach parity with the United States.

However, Donald Trump’s tariffs may permanently foreclose China’s access to the U.S. market as a low-cost export platform. China’s population is shrinking, with births in 2025 falling to 7.92 million, less than half the number recorded a decade ago, and the working-age population declining by 6.62 million in that year alone.

Beijing has already acknowledged the demographic reality by downgrading its own long-term GDP growth target from 4.8% to 4.2% annually through 2035. At 4.2%, the convergence timeline stretches to roughly 40 years. The IMF, however, projects China’s growth rate dropping to 3.4% by 2030. At that rate, China may never reach parity with the U.S., which has grown at an average rate of just over 2% for roughly a century.

Those projections also assume no shocks. Manufacturing is already shifting away from China at a measurable rate: China’s share of U.S. imports fell from 21.6% in 2017 to 7.1% by May 2025, the lowest since 2001. Every percentage point of manufacturing that relocates to Vietnam, India, or Mexico is output, employment, and tax revenue that China does not generate. The 30-year scenario is Beijing’s best case. The evidence points toward China never reaching parity with the US.

The IMF’s April 2026 World Economic Outlook puts the nominal gap between the U.S. and Chinese economies at $11.2 trillion. Using 2024 full-year actuals, U.S. GDP stood at $29.18 trillion against China’s $18.74 trillion, a difference of $10.4 trillion.

The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) claim to legitimacy rests on its ability to grow the economy.  After the Tiananmen Square massacre, Deng Xiaoping forged an informal social contract: the state would open the economy and deliver prosperity; the people would not challenge party authority. This is why the CCP is so concerned that GDP growth has declined steadily over the past 30 years, and that the decline has accelerated since President Trump began the trade war during his first term.

For decades, companies from around the world have manufactured in China to take advantage of low labor costs and then exported to the U.S. market. During the years of high economic growth, salaries in China increased, and profit margins narrowed. With tariffs now significantly higher, manufacturing in China has become less competitive, and investment has been redirected.

Keep reading

Even the Big, Blue Towns Are Sick of the Democratic Freak-Show

Albert Einstein wrote the following in a letter to his son in the 1950s about American politics: “There’s something amazing about America’s democracy, it’s got a gyroscope, and just when you think it’s going to go off the cliff, it rights itself.”

Some 70 years later, we see that gyroscope is once again at work. 

As the communists who cosplay as Democrats continue to push “woke” codswallop down the throats of any American still too daft to recognize cultural Marxism, even as a bearded lady showers next to their tween daughter, many Americans living on the West Coast — including those who hopscotch to work through hypodermic needles and human feces, which I call “Democrat street kabobs” — are starting to realize that Democrats are communists and communism sucks.

Keep reading

Federal Watchdog: At Parole Pipeline’s Peak, Biden’s DHS Released Almost 9-in-10 Migrants Arriving at Border

Former President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS), led by then-Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, released nearly 90 percent of migrants arriving at the southern border into the United States with parole at the program’s peak, a federal watchdog reveals.

A report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the independent agency that works on behalf of Congress, reveals the extent to which Biden and Mayorkas carried out an expansive catch and release policy at the U.S.-Mexico border from early 2021 until Jan. 20, 2025.

In particular, the GAO report probed Biden and Mayorkas’s parole pipeline which was used to justify the release of millions of migrants into American communities. Prior to 2021, parole authority had been sparingly used by administrations.

With the implementation of so-called “humanitarian parole,” Biden and Mayorkas blew the lid off executive parole authority, the GAO report details.

“Specifically, our analysis showed that OFO and Border Patrol granted relatively few paroles during fiscal years 2019 and 2020,” the GAO report states:

During this time period the proportion of southwest border encounters resulting in parole ranged from about 3 percent to 28 percent. The number of paroles granted increased beginning in the summer of 2021 and peaked in December 2022, when 89 percent of encounters resulted in parole. Paroles granted declined substantially after December 2022 and again after January 2025.

In addition, the GAO report suggests that Biden and Mayorkas so overwhelmed the nation’s immigration enforcement system that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents today are struggling to locate parole migrants.

“… without readily accessible information about noncitizens’ parole status, ICE does not have the information it needs to identify and monitor these noncitizens, or to take enforcement action, as appropriate,” the GAO report states.

Though the Biden administration is gone, some of its key players in its immigration agenda are back lobbying elected Democrats to commit to reimposing such border policies if they win back Congress in the midterms and the White House in 2028.

Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former DHS bureaucrat under Biden who also worked in the Obama administration and for a couple of years in President Donald Trump’s first term, recently received a glowing profile in The Seattle Times regarding her new podcast venture.

During her tenure under Biden, Trickler-McNulty sought to create a program that would see millions of illegal aliens merely check in annually to ICE agents, turning the nation’s borders into a European-style checkpoint. Most of those check-ins would not be in-person, but rather done electronically.

Keep reading

Washington Nationals Director of Community Relations Admits on Hidden Camera to Discriminating Against Christian Pitcher Trevor Williams

The O’Keefe Media Group on Tuesday released an undercover video of Washington Nationals Director of Community Relations, Sean Hudson, admitting to religious discrimination against Christian pitcher Trevor Williams.

Hudson told the OMG undercover journalist that he also surveilled the Nationals’ fans’ Google history.

“One of our pitchers, Trevor Williams. He’s super Christian-Catholic, all these tattoos that mean a lot,” Hudson told the undercover reporter.

“The Dodgers had a group… who were drag queens who sometimes dressed up as nuns. [Trevor Williams] went on social media like… ‘This is my religion. You all are mocking it,’” he said.

“Because of that, we don’t use [Trevor Williams] on social [media],” Hudson added.

“Like, when they’re like, is a hot dog a sandwich? And like, the players come up, you know what I mean? Like, we don’t ask [Trevor Williams],” Hudson admitted.

Hudson then told the undercover reporter that the Nationals assign fans to different groups based on their Google history.

“If you ever come to a Nats game, there is someone on our team who is responsible for figuring out everything about you and assigning you into a bucket of people. If you’re accepting cookies, we’re getting a plethora of your Google history,” he said.

Keep reading

Iraq’s Oil Collapse Sparks Race For New Export Routes

  • Iraq’s oil production has collapsed to just 1.39 million bpd after the Strait of Hormuz blockade stranded exports.
  • Baghdad is urgently trying to revive northern export routes through Turkey, including the Kirkuk-Ceyhan system and a new Kirkuk-Nineveh pipeline.
  • China is re-emerging as a major strategic player in Iraq’s energy infrastructure, with Chinese firms heavily involved in Baghdad’s new north-south pipeline expansion.

April was indeed the cruellest month for decades for Iraq’s crude oil production, with an average of 1.389 million barrels per day (bpd) over the period. This compares to a monthly average of 3.47 million bpd from January 2002 to the end of March this year, and an average of over 4.1 million bpd in the three months leading up to the onset of the U.S./Israel-Iran War on 28 February. The last time oil production fell to the current level in the country was in the early 2000s, during and immediately following the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. Even for a diversified economy, this would spell bad news, but for Iraq, it is existential, with over 90% of its annual budget historically coming from oil and around 95% of that black gold having to pass through the still-blockaded Strait of Hormuz before it is monetised. The effective closure of that key export route meant that Iraq’s domestic oil storage tanks quickly filled to maximum capacity, and because it has extremely limited options to transport its crude elsewhere, it has been forced to shut down production wells entirely. As disastrous as it is now, even worse may be to come soon, as these shutdowns can cause permanent damage to wells through a loss of reservoir pressure, water infiltration, and corrosion, among other factors. In Iraq’s case, many of its biggest mature southern fields are highly susceptible to these problems. This is why the race has been on in Baghdad to secure other export options, most notably now, pipeline options in the north, but these bring their own sets of problems with them.

Keep reading

SCOTUS Case Makes Freight Brokers Responsible For Crashes Caused By Commercial Immigrant Drivers

hirty people died in 17 semi-truck crashes caused by noncitizen commercial truck drivers in 2025, according to the Department of Transportation. That number is almost certainly an undercount. Prior to 2025, the immigration status of a commercial truck driver was mostly not recorded in crash reports, court filings, or news coverage. The national conversation focuses on the truck driver at fault for the latest accident, but rarely goes deeper. Why was this truck driver on the highways? What trucking company hired him? How are operations like this still in business?

Somewhere between receiving a package from the distribution center to your doorstep, there is a strong possibility that a freight broker was involved. Freight brokers exist to manage freight and risk for shippers, and to hire motor carriers (trucking companies) to haul that freight. They collect the margin between what the shipper pays them and what they pay the trucking company.

Until a Supreme Court ruling earlier this month, it was not considered the freight broker’s problem whether the trucking company it hired had a history of terrible safety violations, employed properly trained drivers, or safely maintained its trucks. Brokers had little reason not to hire cheaper, non-compliant trucking companies over compliant ones.

On May 14, the Supreme Court handed down a unanimous decision in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC, and found that freight brokers can be held legally responsible for negligently hiring unsafe trucking companies.

Before the ruling, a freight broker’s liability depended on which state the crash occurred in. Negligent hiring claims against freight brokers have proceeded for years in the Sixth and Ninth Circuits, but not in the Seventh (Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin) and Eleventh (Alabama, Florida, and Georgia) Circuits, as freight brokers claimed preemption by the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act of 1994. This left semi-truck crash victims in different parts of the country with fundamentally different legal options against the same class of defendant.

When a freight broker hired a trucking company, and that company’s truck driver caused a wreck that killed someone, the broker often walked away. The trucking company absorbed the liability, the family absorbed the loss, and when the verdict exceeded the carrier’s $750,000 minimum insurance coverage (a federal floor set in 1980 and never adjusted for inflation), the family absorbed that too. The middleman who chose the trucking company and profited from the load often faced no legal consequence.

Keep reading

Carney Calls Alberta Referendum a ‘Dangerous Bluff’, as Oil-Rich Province Set To Vote on Leaving Woke Canada

Alberta separatism is a reality, despite establishment figures such as Carney trying to deny the facts.

As the oil-rich province of Alberta gears up for the October referendum on separating from globalist Canada, the pushback from defenders of the status quo is relentless.

Liberal Prime Minister Mark Carney is one of them.

After branding Alberta essential to Canada, Carney has criticized its upcoming referendum as a ‘dangerous bluff’, comparing it to the Brexit process of the UK leaving the European Union.

BBC reported:

“Carney, who led the Bank of England during Brexit, said that 10 years on from the referendum the UK was ‘trying to undo what people didn’t think they were voting for, but what they ended up having’.

Keep reading

Maryland Gov. Wes Moore Signs Glock Ban Into Law

Governor Wes Moore (D) signed legislation Tuesday banning the sale Glocks and Glock-clones into law, making Maryland the second state to enact such a ban.

On April 9, 2026, Breitbart News reported that Maryland’s House followed the state Senate’s lead and passed a ban on Glocks and other handguns Democrats describe as “machine gun convertible.”

California led the way with such a ban, and as the Golden State did this, Breitbart News pointed out that the Democrat-sponsored legislation was fashioned as a response to the use of “Glock Switches,” which are already illegal. “Glock switches” are federally prohibited plastic pieces that can be affixed to the rear of a Glock slide to make the pistol shoot full auto.

“Glock switches” are popular with gangs and street criminals, therefore California Democrats banned new sales of one the most popular handguns ever made, the Glock pistol.

Keep reading

A Century of Progressive Apartheid

This year marks the centennial of zoning in the United States, when the Supreme Court upheld comprehensive municipal land-use restrictions over the claims of property owners. The decision, Euclid v. Ambler Realty, was a milestone in the progressives’ campaign to overcome constitutional impediments to their plans for social engineering. In the ensuing century, zoning fundamentally altered the geography of American life, turning what had just become an urban-majority nation into a suburban one. Critics on both the libertarian right and woke left condemn zoning as a back-door version of apartheid, a stealthy way to keep immigrants and blacks out of “desirable” neighborhoods.

By 1900, Southern states had enacted segregation laws for “places of public accommodation” (hotels, restaurants, railroads, and the like), and the Court upheld these in 1896’s Plessy v. Ferguson. The residential segregation campaign began later, a response to the “Great Migration” of blacks into border-state cities in the 1910s. This campaign faced more constitutional difficulties due to American doctrines of property rights.

Baltimore enacted the first residential segregation law in 1910. Louisville enacted a law that prohibited members of one race from moving into a block in which the other race was a majority. The NAACP cleverly arranged a case in which a white man, Buchanan, sued to overturn the law. Buchanan sold his house on a white-majority block (situated between the only two black-owned houses on the block) to a black man, Warley. When Warley refused to complete the purchase because of the Louisville ordinance, Buchanan sued him. Given his house’s situation between the only two black-owned houses on the block, Buchanan argued, no white man would buy it. In Buchanan v. Warley (1917), the Supreme Court struck down the Louisville law as a violation of individual property rights. Edward Bassett, the “father of zoning,” lamented that cases like this indicated that American law “gave real estate owners almost total control over the use of their property.”

To get around this constitutional impediment, segregationists devised the “racially restrictive covenant,” in which a purchase contract forbade selling the property to members of certain races. The title search for a house that I purchased in 2007 turned up a restrictive covenant from the 1925 sale of the property. The purchaser agreed never to sell the parcel “to any one of the Ethiopian or African descent.” He also promised “that no dwelling house shall be erected on the property that costs less than $1500”—a zoning-use restriction avant la lettre. The Supreme Court upheld such covenants in 1926, the same year that it upheld more comprehensive zoning laws.

Zoning was a “quintessentially progressive concept,” historian Michael Allen Wolfe observes, exemplifying the movement’s faith in expertise and state power. It fit particularly into the progressives’ belief that the state could improve the genetic stock of the population, based on their belief in racial group hierarchy and eugenics. One can see the first zoning ordinances in the efforts of cities like San Francisco to control Chinese laundries, and in New York City’s tenement-manufacturing laws.

Keep reading

California Dem Governor Candidate Xavier Becerra Wants Free Healthcare for Illegals, Boasts About Jobs They Take From Americans

Xavier Becerra, the former Obama Biden lackey who is running for governor of California as a Democrat, wants the state to continue to provide free healthcare for illegals. Big surprise, right?

He confirmed this during a recent appearance on CNN.

The remarkable thing about the segment is that he admitted that illegals take jobs away from Americans, not just in farming, but in construction, healthcare and more.

You can tell from the smug look on his face that he thought he was being so clever about this.

Breitbart News reported:

Host Elex Michaelson said that Hilton “says he wants to take the undocumented off of healthcare rolls. Why do you want to keep them on there, and how much is that going to cost the state?”

Becerra answered, “He looks at them as people who don’t have documents. I look at them as hard workers. I look at them as people like my parents. I am the son of immigrants. To me, I want you to build, help me build California. If you’re working hard, I want you to have healthcare. I guess Steve Hilton doesn’t care if they work really hard. He looks at their status, and that’s about it.”

Michaelson then said, “Well, he says that they broke the law. And he says that he immigrated here legally and that spending money to give somebody healthcare is incentivizing bad behavior.”

Becerra responded, “He doesn’t seem to mind that the price of food is a little lower because these are the folks that are picking the crops. He doesn’t seem to mind that the places that you can buy to live in are places that these folks built. He doesn’t seem to mind that they’re the folks that are taking care of probably one of his relatives, probably taking care of his yards. He seems to mind that they don’t have documents, but he doesn’t seem to mind that they do so much of the work in California.”

Keep reading