Jan. 16, 2023
Permission to republish original opeds and cartoons granted.
House Republicans eye debt ceiling to restore fiscal sanity in Washington, D.C. after U.S. borrowed and printed $6 trillion for Covid
By Robert Romano
U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has warned that the U.S. debt ceiling will come due on Jan. 19, as so-called “extraordinary measures” of refinancing the debt up to the current limit $31.4 trillion are reached, setting up a showdown in Congress as the newly elected U.S. House majority led by Republicans looks to trim the federal budget by capping discretionary and mandatory spending in key areas.
The debt ceiling legislation was last increased in Dec. 2021 by $2.5 trillion when Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate.
Now, Republicans have a seat at the table. The last time this happened was in 2011, and the result was discretionary spending caps, known as budget sequestration, that limited the growth of defense and non-defense discretionary spending, saving hundreds of billions of dollars.
As a result, the budget deficit was brought from $1.3 trillion in 2011 all the way down to $441 billion in 2015, the year Republicans won back the U.S. Senate. From there, the practice was terminated, and the budget deficit again ballooned, reaching $983 billion by 2019.
That was before Covid. In 2020, a record $3.1 trillion deficit, according to data compiled by the White House Office of Management and Budget. $2.7 trillion in 2021. $1.4 trillion in 2022.
All told, more than $6 trillion was printed, borrowed and spent into existence to offset the global economic lockdowns that temporarily disabled labor markets’ functionality as citizens were told to remain in their households.
The result was massive inflation which was exacerbated by another black swan, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that further harmed global supply chain issues already beleaguered by the production halt from Covid.
Now Congress can be a part of the solution. Simply by spending less or even freezing discretionary spending as in the successful 2011 debt ceiling compromise between then U.S. House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) — who had the Tea Party-fueled majority to help create pressure — and former President Barack Obama, the Federal Reserve won’t need to create as many new dollars to offset a borrowing binge.
Especially as the global economy catches up with demand from the Covid production halt, slowing down the printing and borrowing is the way Congress can tap on the brakes and get control on the inflation.
Juicy options include rolling back green spending from the Inflation Reduction Act and stepped up Internal Revenue Service enforcement including an additional 87,000 IRS agents, as well as creating a years-long plan to reduce the budget deficit to more sane levels.
But to get there might require some defense cuts in order to get the Senate to agree to non-defense cuts. In the least, that’s how it was done last time, which is to say that might be the only way. Already House Speaker McCarthy has said he is open to this possibility, looking to freeze spending at 2022 levels.
And that’s all the original sequestration truly contemplated, holding discretionary spending at more sustainable levels for a few years. If it could be done in 2011, it can be done in 2023. It’s not asking too much from taxpayers’ who have been footing the bill via the inflation tax.
For House Speaker McCarthy, this creates an opportunity for the majority to vote on amendments that can reduce the size and scope of government. There aren’t too many must-pass pieces of legislation, and so this is a very big test for the new House Republican majority to, if only temporarily, to restore fiscal sanity in Washington, D.C. especially before any recession happens to worsen, and the reverse pressure will be to increase spending, especially if unemployment begins rising. If they don’t cut spending now, they might not get a chance later.
Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government.
Mark Paoletta: Why I Think of Clarence Thomas and the Nuns Who Inspired Him Each MLK Day
By Mark Paoletta
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is hailed by many for his inspiring life. But through it all, good or bad, Thomas stays focused on the important things in life.
He never has forgotten those who helped him along the way. For many years on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the justice would visit his eighth-grade teacher, Sister Mary Virgilius Reidy, and dozens of her fellow nuns, in a retirement convent in New Jersey.
Clarence Thomas was born into abject poverty in the segregated Deep South to parents who were poor and uneducated. His father left when he was 2, and he ultimately was sent to live with his grandparents in Savannah, Georgia.
His grandfather enrolled Clarence and his brother in St. Benedict’s, a segregated, all-black, Catholic elementary school. It was run by the Missionary Franciscan Sisters of the Immaculate Conception (most of them from Ireland), who endured disparaging slurs, including the N-word, for dedicating their lives to teaching black students.
“They wore that as a badge of honor,” Thomas recalls in the book “Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words,” which I co-edited with Michael Pack.
The Franciscan nuns changed his life, and Thomas always has been grateful for their love and support. The nuns held their students to the highest academic standards, and did not allow them to make any excuse, even though these students lived under state-enforced discrimination.
As Thomas recounts in “Created Equal”: “You knew they loved you. When you think somebody loves you and deeply cares about your interests, somehow they can get you to do hard things.”
In the 1980s, when he was part of the Reagan administration, Thomas sought out Sister Virgilius, who was living in Boston. Thomas recalls: “I went by to see her, and I sat with her, and I thanked her for teaching me and making me believe that we could learn, and for not letting me slip into victim status and forcing me out of it.”
In 1984, Thomas returned to his hometown of Savannah to pay tribute at an event honoring the Franciscan Sisters, where he said:
There was no way I could have survived if it had not been for the nuns—our nuns, who made me pray when I didn’t want to and didn’t know why I should—who made me work when I saw no reason to—who made me believe in the equality of races when our country paid lip service to equality and our church tolerated inequality—who made me accept responsibilities for my own life when I looked for excuses. No, my friends, without our nuns, I would not have made it to square one.
Thomas again thanked the nuns when he was nominated by President George H.W. Bush to the Supreme Court in 1991, and Sister Virgilius, then 80 years old and nursing a broken arm, later testified on behalf of her former student at his confirmation hearings.
After Thomas joined the Supreme Court, for many years on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, we would leave his home around 6 a.m. and drive up to Tenafly, New Jersey, to spend the day with Sister Virgilius and her fellow sisters, many of whom also taught Thomas and others at St. Benedict’s.
We had lunch in the cafeteria with all the nuns, and Thomas’ face displayed such joy as he reminisced about those days and caught up on how the nuns were all doing. He would visit sisters who were bedridden in the infirmary.
When Sister Virgilius passed away in 2013 at age 100, we attended her funeral together.
In October 2021, many celebrated Thomas’ 30th anniversary on the Supreme Court and his influence on American law, including a daylong celebration at The Heritage Foundation with remarks by the justice himself. But Thomas was more focused on an event earlier that week: the blessing of a statue of Sister Virgilius and two students at a cemetery where 200 Franciscan sisters are buried.
On a beautiful October day, in a small, private ceremony attended by more than 20 nuns, many of whom were in their 80s, along with friends and family members, Thomas greeted all of them with hugs and smiles.
When he made his brief remarks, Thomas fought through tears to thank the nuns who changed his life. It was a beautiful moment that captured his humility.
“This extraordinary statue is dedicated to you sisters—to all of you who have given so much and who have asked for so little,” he said.
As Martin Luther King Jr. Day comes around every year, I always think of how these nuns changed the course of Clarence Thomas’ life, and how this great man, our nation’s greatest Supreme Court justice, always found time to honor those who helped him under the most difficult of circumstances.
It’s a compelling American story.
To view online: https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/01/15/why-i-think-of-clarence-thomas-and-the-nuns-who-inspired-him-each-mlk-day/