We can’t wait until January 2025 to deal with the woke and weaponized government attacking our life, liberty, way of life, and civilization. We need an inflection point right now to force a cathartic national debate on the continuation of biomedical tyranny, political targeting, the surveillance state, gender grooming, open borders, and anarcho-tyranny – just to name a few existential threats from the federal government. The debt ceiling fight, the annual appropriations bills, and several agency reauthorization bills are the only leverage points we have.

So far, the House leadership is passing its first step in activating those inflection points. Will this time be different? Will the leaders stand behind it without caving when the going gets rough in June?

Yesterday, Speaker McCarthy released the bill from the GOP offering to raise the debt limit for either a year or a dollar amount of $1.5 trillion. But for once, in return for temporarily raising the debt limit to deal with the mistakes already made by government, this bill promises immediate reforms that not only stop the growth of government, but will help strip it of the resources officials need to control our lives. The bill would cut over $4 trillion from the baseline trajectory of discretionary spending without touching Social Security and Medicare, institute 10 years of budget caps, and repeal Biden’s climate new deal – as we called for – so that the green energy fascism cannot get off the ground and so that we don’t have 87,000 more IRS agents targeting political opponents.

Additionally, the bill attaches the REINS Act, an idea from a decade ago, which would force every regulation promulgated by federal agencies with a cost of more than $100 million to be subject to congressional approval. This is how we stop runaway debt and growth of government with entire programs and industries created by administrative fiat without any statutory authority. The bill also contains sundry other provisions, such as instituting work requirements for some welfare programs and rescinding Biden’s student loan debt bailout.

It's not new for Republicans to pass a good bill months away from the brinksmanship deadline and then cave on us, but what has changed is that, thanks to the January speaker fight, conservatives finally have power and input, and the results are showing. Despite a cadre of 50 or so whining RINOs on his left flank, McCarthy has incorporated much of what the Freedom Caucus asked for in its proposal last month.

As such, so long as it’s clear that this vote will not be used in preparation for a quasi-blank check later on when the pressure builds, this bill is worth supporting. It’s worth showing a united front behind a proposal that actually authorizes more debt without greenlighting endless debt thereafter in perpetuity. It forces McConnell and the liberal Senate Republicans to either reject sound policymaking and join with Biden or unite behind fighting an unpopular president and a Fourth Reich style of government.

Obviously, we can debate which provisions we’d like to see in the bill, but so long as it is a precondition for any debt limit increase, it’s worth giving McCarthy leeway, given the ankle biting of the RINO caucus threatening to join Democrats. Although I’d be remiss not to point out that many of those members are in Congress only because McCarthy naively supported them in primaries. Hopefully, this will serve as a wake-up call that it is better policy and politics to work with conservatives than RINO ankle biters, one of whom threatened to help Democrats force a vote (discharge petition) on a blank check debt limit increase.

Immediately after passing the debt ceiling bill, Republicans should press forward and begin work on the 12 annual appropriations bills funding government based on the principles established in this bill, but with even greater specificity. The overarching principle should be that no government program will receive funding if it is used to infringe upon civil liberties, unfairly target specific groups of Americans, violates the bodily autonomy of the citizenry, spies on law-abiding citizens, or contributes to inflation, scarcity, and the degradation of the standard of living for Americans. In other words, government must work toward the common good and general welfare, not against it.

Next, Republicans must be clear in their messaging that there is no automatic default once government is forced to issue new debt to pay for the entire budget. There is only default when they fail to pay the interest on the debt. Our government wants to spend an unfathomable $6.4 trillion this year. It takes in about $4.8 trillion in tax revenue. That is enough to cover Social Security, Medicare, the military, veterans, and interest on the debt. So there is no immediate default. But if we don’t stop this now, we will have to print endless money just to pay the interest on the debt, which will create even more inflation.

\u201cAn hour ago, your government just borrowed $36 Billion dollars for 3 months.\nThey are paying 5.02% to do this.\nThe cost to borrow this:\nToday: $452 million\n1 year ago today: $75 million\nSee the problem?\u201d

— Frog Capital (@Frog Capital) 1681922410

Even before this era of eye-popping debt, there was a bipartisan consensus that accumulation of debt should be avoided like the plague. James Madison warned that “public debt is a public curse, and in a Republican Government a greater than in any other.” Even the “big government” champion of the time, Alexander Hamilton, declared that “nothing can more affect national prosperity than a constant and systematic attention to extinguish the present debt and to avoid as much as possibly the incurring of any new debt.”

This is why the debt ceiling is so important. Whereas politicians are unwilling to debate the imperative of a single program, the debt ceiling was a massive roadblock that could force a national discussion on the entire budget — a debate on the true role of the federal government and its priorities (and scandalous behavior).

In light of the $10 trillion COVID spend-a-thon, how could we not force this national debate from any political perspective? As late as the first term of George W. Bush, the gross federal debt was “only” 60% of GDP. Today it is 121% of our economy, higher than during the peak of WWII! It is now nearly three times the size it was when the Tea Party was formed in response.

For years, we were lectured to by liberals that income inequality based on natural factors was a societal ill that engendered a need for government to redistribute wealth from the wealthier to the less fortunate. Yet it turns out that their policies of endless fiscal and monetary stimulus, culminating with the catastrophic COVID policies, unnaturally made the wealthy wealthier at the expense of the core middle and middle-upper income earners, all the while making lower-income people dependent upon endless handouts with no upward mobility. Somehow, they have no problem with income inequality so long as government, not natural law, is the culprit.

The human toll of our COVID policies is unrivaled in human history and will be felt for years to come. But the economic toll might last even longer. Our government injected $11 trillion into the economy, created out of whole cloth, in what should have been decades’ worth of spending, but it was packed into a little over a year.

So what were the results? We always knew that when the government spends ungodly sums of money, it is undergirded by a targeted agenda to pick winners and losers. Who won and who lost in the COVID print-a-thon? There are several ways to skin this cat, but nothing demonstrates the massive transfer of wealth better than the following Federal Reserve charts depicting the percentage of assets owned by income percentile before and after the COVID spending bomb.

Here is the trajectory for the top 1%:

As you can see, the top 1% own nearly 30% of all assets in the country. I don’t inherently have a problem with this, but the fact that their share of the pie jumped more than 10% in just one year from the COVID money printing that should bother us all. Now, let’s contrast the results of this trend in 2020-2021 with those in the 50%-90% wealth bracket, roughly the people who once composed the great American middle class and small business owners.

While the top 1% increased their share of the pie by 10%, the middle and upper middle class decreased their share by 7%. The share of assets that the top 1% hold are roughly on par with all the individuals in the 50th-90th percentile. Prior to the Federal Reserve and Congress’ money printing schemes beginning in the 2000s, the upper middle class accounted for almost twice as many assets as the top 1%.

While the upper middle class took a hit, exemplified through the permanent closure of 10,000 businesses, the communists made sure to keep the lower-income folks temporarily content with the lockdowns by making them eligible for thousands of dollars of “stimulus” handouts. Their share of the pie skyrocketed by over 20% in just one year!

As you can see, they initially also took a hit with the shutdown, but eventually the endless government checks worked their magic. Obviously none of this is economically healthy, because these people have few prospects for upward mobility.

What is the result of this great transfer of wealth? We were all shocked and appalled when Obama began setting the precedent for $1 trillion annual budget deficits. Well, our government just announced a $1.1 trillion deficit from the first half of this fiscal year. Most Americans cannot afford the predictable inflation resulting from the endless printing of money, as online grocery prices were up 10.3% just in March. In order to create this great transfer of wealth, our government increased our money supply from $4 trillion to $19 trillion in one year!

\u201cSo even though joe will tell you inflation is 'down'\n$100 bucks in 2020, is only worth $86 dollars today.\nThere's no way to sugar coat this disaster..\u201d

— Frog Capital (@Frog Capital) 1681296659

It doesn’t take a genius to understand why $100 pre-COVID in 2020 is now worth just $86 today! The purchasing power of the dollar is now down nearly 40% of what it was just a generation ago, and no, wages have not grown commensurately.

How’s that for income inequality? All that money printing that benefited the wealthy and well connected was worth the inflationary effects for them, but not for those less fortunate, especially those who don’t want to live off welfare.

Andrew Jackson presciently warned about the effects of a central bank and its ability to manipulate the economy tendentiously for the well connected rather than allowing the free market to control the flow of money and interest rates.

“It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes,” wrote Jackson in his 1832 veto message on the bill re-chartering the national bank. He had no problem with God-ordained inequality resulting from natural law, but government is not natural law. Jackson continued: “Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government. Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth can not be produced by human institutions. In the full enjoyment of the gifts of Heaven and the fruits of superior industry, economy, and virtue, every man is equally entitled to protection by law; but when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society — the farmers, mechanics, and laborers — who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their Government.”

Jackson ended by powerfully noting, “There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses.”