Christopher Chantrill - Writer, conservative, government spending taxes debt deficit

Christopher Chantrill

Welcome!

WELCOME. I am Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill, writer and conservative. You can see my work at the following sites:

Road to the Middle Class contains the eponymous book and my daily blog. It investigates and celebrates the cultural artefacts that ordinary people appropriate as they struggle to adapt from country ways to the demands of life in the city. Start here.

An American Manifesto is the site for my book and blog. I am writing this book about "life after liberalism" and blogging about it as I go. All are invited to comment. Start here.

USgovernmentspending.com is a resource on government spending in the United States. It presents tables and charts on federal, state, and local government expenditure in the United States from 1902 to the present. Spending data are sourced from US budget data and US Census reports. Start here.

US Spending 101 is a “university” of government spending. It features several walks through the pages of the usgovernmentspending.com suite of websites. And the learning never stops. But it is not a real university, nor does it offer credits for courses completed. Start here.

USgovernmentrevenue.com is a resource on government taxes and receipts in the United States. It presents tables and charts on federal, state, and local government taxes, charges, use fees, and business revenue in the United States from 1902 to the present. Revenue data are sourced from US budget data and US Census reports. Start here.

UKpublicspending.co.uk is a resource on public spending in the United Kingdom. It presents tables and charts on public expenditure by central government, local authorities, and public corporations in the United Kingdom from 1900 to the present. Spending data is sourced from UK government Public Expenditure Statistical Analyses, the UK National Statistics “Blue Book,” and academic studies. Start here.

UKpublicrevenue.co.uk is a resource on public revenue in the United Kingdom. It presents tables and charts on public revenues by central government, and local authorities in the United Kingdom from 1900 to the present. Revenue data is sourced from UK Office for Budget Responsibility, the UK National Statistics and academic studies. Start here.

American Thinker publishes my op-eds most weeks. Click here.

US Stuck on Stupid analyzes the perfect storm of political bungling in the years from 1929 to 1939 that plunged the American people into untold misery during the Great Depression. Start here.

US Presidential Elections tabulates the results of presidential elections going back to 1788. Start here.

US Midterm Elections tabulates the history of midterm elections for the US Senate and the US House of Representatives going back to 1790. You can sort the elections by year, by party strength, and by party gains and losses. Start here.

Biography

I AM CHRISTOPHER CHANTRILL, a member of the international capitalist conspiracy. Both my grandfathers owned and operated import/export businesses in the early twentieth century, one in St. Petersburg, Russia, where my father was born, and the other in Kobe, Japan, where my mother was born.

I was born in India and raised and educated in England. I immigrated to the United States in 1968 and worked for many years designing and implementing utility control systems and software in Seattle.

Soon after moving to Seattle, I instinctively revolted against the suffocating left-coast culture of the Soviet of Washington, and soon came to revere the four great Germans who helped inspire the Reagan revolution: Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, Leo Strauss, and Eric Voegelin. Since then I have broadened my appreciation of “The German Turn” that has transformed the world over the last 200 years.

I have written for Liberty, FrontPageMag.com, and The American Thinker. My book Road to the Middle Class celebrates the self-governing culture of the United States in which enthusiastic Christianity, education, mutual aid, and living under law have taught generations of immigrants to rise from indigence in the countryside to a life of competence and prosperity in the city. My book An American Manifesto: Life after Liberalism tries to imagine what America would look like after the end of left-wing politics and big government.

Disclaimer and Transparency

WE make no respresentation about the accuracy of the data presented in these websites. Nor does Christopher Chantrill represent himself to possess any formal qualifications to select, evaluate or present the information. Users are urged to check all data against the published data sources and to report any errors or inconsistencies.

The websites have no relationship with any government institution, or any other institution. They are supported solely by advertising and by the life, fortune, and sacred honor of Christopher Chantrill.

Daily Blogging

WE BLOG DAILY, Monday to Friday, chiefly on national US politics, religion, education, mutual aid, and law. We also look at our junior partners in the global Anglospheric hegemony, the British. It is hard to say why, but very often our blogging zeroes in like a laser on liberal hypocrisies, monopolies, and sinecures. Of course, we love our liberal friends to bits, but we do not take them quite as seriously as they do. If we get too pompous and serious, please get in touch and tell us to lighten up.

We love to get email from our readers. And you can follow on Twitter .

Enjoy.

LATEST BLOG

There's a Fresh Face in Britland

All the established political parties in the West are hurting. If it’s the US, we have the old-line Democrats being pummeled by the DSA far left and the moderate Republicans being pummeled by the populist hard center.

In Britland the two parties that have dominated politics since just after World War I, Conservative and Labour, are both being eclipsed, by Reform on the right and by the Green Party on the left.

Yesterday in Britain a potential replacement for Labour Party Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, Andy Burnham, was elected to Parliament in a by-election in the constituency of Makersfield.

But will anything change? Obviously not, because the fundamental fact about modern government, especially in Britain, is that it spends up to 50% GDP on handouts. And the one thing that will cause a political party to implode is cutting the handouts. No fresh face leading an existing political party will make a blind bit of difference.

The universal rule in modern politics is to rile up your supporters against an enemy, and offer them handouts. President Roosevelt railed against the economic royalists and gave handouts to the working class, including jobs in the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration and then Social Security. But President Johnson declared a War on Poverty — “poverty, disease, and ignorance” — and proposed to cure it with Great Society handout programs from Medicare to Medicaid. Subsequently Democrats declared racists the enemy and “affirmative action” the solution. And then bigots in general as the enemy and DEI as the solution. President Reagan declared economic stagnation the enemy and proposed a handout of tax rate cuts — but no spending cuts.

Today, Sen. Warren (D-MA) says that with her “ultra-millionaire wealth tax we could pay for child care for all three and four year olds in America.”

It’s really not that hard. Politics always reduces to an enemy and a handout. Politicians nimbly skip from yesterday’s enemy to tomorrow’s villain. But the handout stays, because all humans demand that the handouts they enjoy are their’s by right and any reduction would be a vile injustice.

It is interesting to me that both here in the US and in Europe the ruling class has augmented its supporters with ramped-up immigration that sidesteps normal bureaucratic procedures with the notion of “asylum seekers.” The immigrants require decades of government handouts before finding their feet in the new society, and they know which party is pushing the handouts.

And the ruling class has funneled handouts to its elite supporters, as it should, with grants and NGOs and extensive administrative supervision of its handout programs for the lower class.

Now, in my view we should transform pension and healthcare programs into mandatory IRA savings accounts and health insurance programs that keep healthcare recipients in touch with prices. But how to do with without a rebellion from today’s recipients?

Maybe education would be a better place to start, by nuking the public schools and universities from orbit — since all education professionals are Democrats — and funding parents for child education and getting employers to pay for credentials.

Put it this way: how could we transform politics so that the enemy is the Director of Handouts and the recipient of government handouts is shamed as a moral leper?

I have no idea.

But one thing is for sure. The educated elite and a century of social programs have made things worse.

| Fri, 19 Jun 2026 22:18:08 GMT |

The Horror of Personal Transportation

There is no question that all good people agree that buses and trains and subways are good, and private cars are bad. Just look at Europe, where everyone goes everywhere on public transportation and loves it.

But here in the US, don’t try to get to a World Cup game by public transportation. Fuhgeddaboudit:

the US is utterly dependent on cars and trucks to function.

At Unherd, B. Duncan Moench, “a writer and scholar of American political culture” writes that:

When a society is built around highways, oil dependence, and endless suburban sprawl, it begins… to look… like the logical extension of an atomistic infrastructure that operates with no concern for the public.

Did you know that the auto companies, with malice aforethought, ripped out the electric streetcars in the 1930s after the electric companies were forced to divest themselves of their glorious urban transportation networks, because monopoly? Oh well.

So now everyone goes everywhere in automobiles and we have “a sedentary population unable to tolerate walking even short distances.” Oh well.

And we need forever wars to keep the supply of gasoline going.

Cheap gasoline becomes a constant strategic necessity. Foreign oil fields become matters of American national security.

On the contrary, I think that cheap, reliable personal transportation is the best thing since sliced bread. It only really got going after World War II when Americans hearkened unto Dinah Shore and decided to “See the USA in Your Chevrolet” and bought suburban homes with picket fences not in Pottersvilles but in Levittowns.

I understand that the best sort has always rather sneered at suburbs and freeways and strip malls, although the Euros visiting the USA to see the World Cup are presently marveling at Buc-ee’s. But then the best sort has always traveled private. In Jane Austen the best people have their own coach or barouche, and if you can’t afford your own coach you have to wait for the rich Mrs. Jennings to invite you along. In Dickens it is clear that only the rough crowd travels on the stage coaches. There was a troubling period when, e.g,, Lady Mary Crawley took the train from Yorkshire up to London to see her doctor. But now the rich all fly private. So that’s all right.

Yes. Today we all fly by air for anything more than a three-hour drive. But really, darling, the crowds at the airports are not to be endured.

Although the liberal narrative on transportation is that cars are a patriarchal imposition on society, I believe that cars and suburbs and picket fences are actually most appealing to women. Women like to raise families away from the hurly burly of the city. And if you’ve ever watched a woman puttering about her SUV in the driveway, loading and unloading it with this and that, you will understand that the smart set will only be able take women’s SUVs out of their cold dead hands.

I wonder if, one fine day, we will all get to fly private on Uber Air. Of course we will, and the best people will organize to stop it, just as they have organized and protested for the last 50 years to stop cars and freeways and suburbs, because the Planet.

| Thu, 18 Jun 2026 22:49:14 GMT |

Chris Chantrill

Email Contact

Take the Test!

US GOVERNMENT EXPENDITURE

At usgovernmentspending.com we have assembled a record of government spending in the United States for the last century. You can view government spending, federal, state, and local, for every year from 1902 to the present. And you can generate charts of that spending. more>>

Amazon.com Widgets

US GOVERNMENT RECEIPTS

At usgovernmentrevenue.com we have assembled a record of government revenue in the United States for the last century. You can view government receipts, federal, state, and local, for every year from 1902 to the present. And you can generate charts of that revenue. more>>

UK PUBLIC EXPENDITURE

At ukpublicspending.co.uk we have assembled a record of public spending in the United Kingdom for the last century. You can view British public spending, central government and local authority, for every year from 1983 to the present. And you can generate charts of that spending. more>>

ROAD TO THE MIDDLE CLASS

The Road to the Middle Class is a journey from a world of power to a world of trust and love. In religion, it is a journey from power gods that respond to sacrifice and augury to the God who makes a covenant with mankind. In education, it is a journey from the world of the spoken word to the world of the written word. In community, it is the journey from dependence on blood kin and upon clientage under a great lord to the mutual aid and the rules of the self-governing fraternal association. In law it is the journey from the violence of force and feud to the king’s peace, the law of contract, and private property.

Road to the Middle Class: The Book

Contents

Chapter One

>>more>>

AN AMERICAN MANIFESTO

With the failure of the welfare state, it is time to consider what comes next. In "An American Manifesto: Life After Liberalism" I develop a narrative about where we are and where we should go to redeem the American experiment.

An American Manifesto: The Book

Contents

Chapter One

>>more>>