The Death of Spending Cuts, Healthy Food Is Anti-Woman, Pushing for a Deal With Hamas
The Death of Spending Cuts, Healthy Food Is Anti-Woman, Pushing for a Deal With Hamas
This morning’s feature story is a heartbreaker: “Britain Embraces a Culture of Death,” by Richard Palmer. The UK’s embrace of euthanasia and late-term abortion reflect a moral collapse, a direct result of rejecting the sanctity of human life revealed in the Bible.
Another sign of moral collapse, not only in the UK but also in America, is the ever escalating size of government and the crushing debt burden it creates:
The death of spending cuts: America and Britain are overspending themselves into extinction and are utterly incapable of reining in the problem.
Donald Trump’s Big, Beautiful Bill squeaked through the Senate yesterday with Vice President JD Vance breaking a 50-50 tie. Trouble is, the Senate version includes larger tax cuts and reduces some spending cuts and revenue raisers in the House bill—adding $3.3 trillion in deficit spending, compared to the $2.4 trillion the House approved.
Americans have as close to a consensus about the federal government needing to reduce spending as about anything. But what to cut? Here the consensus evaporates. The fact that a Republican Senate and House under a Republican president who campaigned on cutting spending are inflating the deficits shows the immense political pressures in the American system to keep spending, regardless of longer-term dangers.
Now the bill must return to the House. Speaker Mike Johnson said he is “not happy with what the Senate did to our product.” Axios is reporting that more than 20 Republicans plan to block the bill. President Trump is putting enormous pressure on them to abandon their principles and pass it. We shall see what happens in this high-stakes game of chicken. Whatever the outcome, the promises of fiscal responsibility truly have died.
Meanwhile in Britain, nearly a quarter of working-age people are on welfare. More than half of households receive more in benefits than they pay in taxes. Last Friday, Richard Palmer told you about the country’s struggle to curtail even ridiculous abuses of disability benefits. One in 10 working-age Britons are on disability, about a quarter of whom claim it for “mental health” issues. Approximately 2,000 to 3,000 more people sign up for this benefit every single day.
When Prime Minister Keir Starmer tried to make it a bit more difficult for individuals to claim just one health benefit—the Personal Independence Payment—his party revolted. So he relaxed the measure to apply only to new claimants, starting 17 months from now. Yesterday, just minutes before Parliament was to vote on it, Starmer dropped even that requirement. The Telegraph reports:
The U-turn means that almost all of the £4.6 billion of annual savings the bill was meant to deliver have been lost, blowing a significant hole in the government’s spending plans.
The government will have to choose between more borrowing, cuts elsewhere or tax increases to fill the gap.
Leader of the Conservative Party, Kemi Badenoch, responded by noting, “By 2030, 1 in every 4 pounds raised through income tax will be spent on health and disability benefits—more than the entire UK defense budget—and that’s excluding all the other benefits.”
In many Labour constituencies, the number of people claiming this one disability benefit is greater than the Labour M.P.’s majority. So if the M.P. votes to remove the benefit, he will lose his seat. As Mr. Palmer said, it raises fundamental questions of the viability of democracy, in which people can vote themselves benefits and simply toss out leaders who demand responsibility.
SELF magazine says the push for healthy food is anti-woman: Erica Sloan’s article “How the MAHA Food Agenda Threatens to Set Women Back Decades” insists that there is a dark, even sexist effect in efforts to curb ultraprocessed foods, synthetic chemicals and ubiquitous medications. What is it? Since women, even working women, do a disproportionate amount of housework and cooking, less dependence on prepackaged foods will mean women spend more time cooking:
Stoking so much fear around these vital industries implies that Americans—more specifically, the mothers of America—need to find a different way to feed their families.
“Women do a disproportionate share of the kind of work that the maha movement is asking people to do, which is to grow their own food, to prepare all of their food from scratch, and to avoid processed food and even packaged foods,” Norah MacKendrick, Ph.D., associate professor of sociology at Rutgers University and author of Better Safe Than Sorry: How Consumers Navigate Exposure to Everyday Toxics, tells SELF. …
“In order for a family to eat a diet of mostly homegrown or even just homemade meals … that’s going to be a lot more work for women and mothers especially,” Dr. MacKendrick says. It’s an ideal that the maha moms have already embodied—and that would be not only unrealistic but unfair to expect from all American families. …
maha’s villainization of food processing just adds the burden of cooking from scratch to women’s plates.
This touches on a profound truth about modern life and the cost it is extracting from us in our health. SELF is correct that the convenience of foods made with synthetic ingredients is meant to replace time spent in the kitchen. The food industry has been pushing this, especially since World War II, when women filled jobs deserted by men who went to war. After the war, women never went back into the home. It truly was the demand for time-saving shortcuts in the kitchen that drove food companies to contrive innovations that have subsequently created so much of the chronic disease afflicting our world today.
As Michael Moss wrote in Salt Sugar Fat, “The decline of scratch cooking wasn’t a corporate plot as much as it was a foregone conclusion when women acquired greater roles in American society.”
The result is a strong corollary to the government overspending: The costs are devastating, but society has become too addicted to the benefits to be willing to wean itself off them.
You may not like it, but here is the truth: Tending a home and nurturing a family require a lot of work, which is why God does intend that women be “keepers at home” (Titus 2:5). People assumed women could work outside the home and families could also be fed good food. That assumption has proven false. There is always a price to pay for rejecting God’s design.
IN OTHER NEWS
Trump still pushing for a deal with Hamas: Fresh off his success in ramrodding a ceasefire onto Israel and Iran, President Trump announced yesterday that Israel agreed to the conditions of a 60-day ceasefire in the Gaza Strip. Mihailo Zekic reports on the details.
Closer to the brink than we thought? Iran had serious plans to mine the Strait of Hormuz, Reuters reported yesterday. Iran’s Parliament voted last month to close the waterway connecting the Persian Gulf to the Indian Ocean. This would have cut off the Middle East’s other major economies from exporting oil and natural gas to the rest of the world, blackmailing the global community. But it would have also hurt Iran’s own oil exports and risk full-on war with the United States, so most analysts thought Iran didn’t intend to follow through. The Reuters report changes this perception. The Trumpet expects Iran to continue gaining leverage over world trade through controlling maritime choke points. Our free booklet The King of the South explains why.
