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

The Reading Panic

All the best people are panicking about declining reading and reading skills. So says The Atlantic.

Kindergarten teachers say that many of their students don’t know nursery rhymes or fairy tales[.]

And kids are using AI:

A student told [his teacher] he used Chat GPT to “translate” Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange from “Old English” to easier language.

And my pal Jeffrey A Tucker agrees with The Atlantic.

Hardly anyone is reading real books anymore. We are not illiterate. We are postliterate.

Here are some more nuggets from The Atlantic article:

Print cultures value lengthy, organized arguments.
The advent of reading and writing was a precondition for philosophy, modern science, history as an academic enterprise, art criticism.
In the 19th century, composing a letter was an art form.

Print culture helped political revolution:

“The ancient Roman and Greek Orators could only speak to the Number of Citizens capable of being assembled within the Reach of Their Voice,” Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1782. “Now by the Press we can speak to Nations; and good Books & well written Pamphlets have great and general Influence.”

But I wonder. I’d say that anyone writing in a magazine or a newspaper has an investment in their developed literacy skills. So of course they think it’s important. And yet 97.2% of writers and scholars are just regurgitating received wisdom. Anyone that diverges from received wisdom, such as World War II and the Holocaust, gets punished.

And anyone that steps outside the sacred transgender narrative finds that they’ll never work in this town again.

I have spent a good part of my life trying to step outside conventional wisdom to consume and write stuff that the ruling educated class hates. I did it because I am a snob and wanted to be better than the average conventional wisdom consumer.

Today, I go for my media advice to Martin Gurri and his The Revolt of the Public. The point of his five wave theory of media, from writing to alphabet to printing to mass media to internet, I think, is that each stage allowed a much bigger audience for people with ideas.

But all along, media was a one-way process, until the internet. And when it came to mass media, that one-way process became a hurricane of ruling-class propaganda. I doubt if we could have had the two world wars without mass media.

But the fifth wave, the world of the internet and now AI has lowered the barriers to entry into the public square, both for creators and consumers.

For the sophisticated, this seems to be a huge devaluation of the public square.

[T]he average kid spends four and a half hours a day on social media. For much of that time, it appears, they are watching videos, often at 2x speed.

Here’s an idea. Back in the day, the crucial skill of humans in sharing knowledge and information was conversation. But conversation is one-on-one. The point of writing and printing and mass media was to convert one-on-one to one-to-many. Each wave obviously increased the reach of a man and an idea by an order of magnitude.

The point of internet media and podcast and social media is that you don’t have to be a professional writer or mass-media expert to communicate. Anyone can speak into your smartphone and send a video out to the world. Now media is many-to-many.

Is 97.2% of internet and social media rubbish? Of course. But then so was mass media.

Does someone asking a question of AI obtain the depth of knowledge and understanding that a study of books would yield? No. But my experience of getting information from AI is that it is much better than Wikipedia, and much faster and more reliable than reading books. And I use it to check my understanding against conventional wisdom.

Back in the day, if you wanted to acquire knowledge you had to develop reading and writing and analysis skills. Otherwise you learned nothing. Today, AI takes care of those skills.

Think about the skilled trades: carpentry, metal-working, plowing. Driving a wagon and a 20-mule team up a mountain pass. Writing computer code by hand. All tremendously difficult skills that require enormous effort to acquire. A few people continue to learn those skills because of the satisfaction of acquiring them, and a sense of connection with the past. But the world has moved on.

The fact is that the cost of broadcasting and exchanging knowledge has been staggeringly reduced by the internet and now the AI age. To people with the old skills of reading and writing difficult books it seems like the end of the world. No doubt there are a lot of things that we will lose.

But the internet and AI have increased the bandwidth of knowledge and cultural exchange enormously. And that, I believe, is a good and beneficial thing.

But kids that don’t know nursery rhymes and fairy tales? That, I agree, is a problem.

| Fri, 10 Jul 2026 01:30:29 GMT |

Chris Chantrill

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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>>

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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

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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

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