The Press-Dispatch
Issue link: https://www.ifoldsflip.com/i/1449492
C-4 Wednesday, Feburar y 9, 2022 The Press-Dispatch OPINION Submit Letters to the Editor: Letters must be signed and received by noon on Mondays. Email: editor@pressdispatch.net or bring in a hard copy: 820 E. Poplar Street, Petersburg Supreme Court nominees — Race can be relevant "Mr. Biden's campaign promise that he'd appoint a black woman to the Supreme Court is unfortunate because it elevates skin color over qualifications." Thus, The Wall Street Journal ed- itorial page captured, in one sen- tence, the sentiment of many if not most of right-of-center white Ameri- cans about the president's campaign pledge, which he appears to have ev- ery intention to fulfill. But, no pun intended, is it all real- ly so black and white? May we ask if ever there might be justification for taking race and gen- der into consideration as deciding factors in making a Supreme Court nomination? I believe we can answer this ques- tion by looking at the one Black jus- tice on the Supreme Court, Associ- ate Justice Clarence Thomas. Thomas is now the longest serv- ing sitting justice on the U.S. Su- preme Court. When he was nominat- ed by President George H.W. Bush in 1991, there was never any question that Bush would nominate an A fri- can American to replace the legend- ary Thurgood Marshall. This was clearly a "Black seat" on the Supreme Court, and it would stay that way. However, race is not a reality with one dimension. Despite what some might think, Black reality is as mul- tifaceted and complex as is all of hu- man reality, and the views of Black Americans cover the full scope of the political spectrum. And thus, Bush did indeed appoint a Black man to replace Marshall. But this Black man was a conservative. And Clarence Thomas has shown himself to be a brilliant conservative addition to the court. Had not Bush felt it politically important to replace Marshall with an A frican American, our country would be the worse off for not having given this A frican American the opportunity to shine and contribute immeasurably to our nation. But the other side of this coin is to note the irony that the then-chair- man of the Senate Judiciary Commit- tee through which Thomas' nomina- tion had to pass was our current pres- ident, Joe Biden. The then-Sen. Biden presided over a confirmation hearing that he allowed to be transformed into a car- nival of pornography, allowing Ani- ta Hill to make shameful public ac- cusations about Thomas that had no place in a Senate hearing, and that defamed Thomas such that one won- ders if full recovery in the court of public opinion is ever possible. In a recent documentary, Thom- as spoke about what happened and how, under Joe Biden's chairmanship of the Judiciary Committee, liberals sought to destroy him because he is a conservative: "People should just tell the truth: This is the wrong Black guy. He has to be destroyed. Just say it. Then now we will be honest with each other." In fact, the track record of liberals toward minority Americans who are not liberal is not pretty. Janice Rogers Brown, a conserva- tive/libertarian A frican American woman who served as a justice on the Supreme Court of California, was nominated by President George W. Bush to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Sen- ate Democrats blocked her nomina- tion for two years until she was final- ly confirmed in 2005. Miguel Estrada is a distinguished Honduran American attorney who arrived as an immigrant without be- ing able to speak English and wound up graduating, magna cum laude, with a Juris Doctor degree from Har- vard Law School. Democrats blocked Bush's nomination of Estrada to the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals because he is a conser- vative. The point is our country has a com- plex history and cultural reality in addition to its ideals. Among our ideals should be mutu- al human respect and decency. There can be justification to Inflation Inflation is the worst in 40 years. The price of cars is up 37 percent. Gas is up 49 percent. During the last few years, as pol- iticians spent ever more money, ex- perts told us not to worry. Jerome Powell, chair of the Feder- al Reserve, said inflation would be "transitory." Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said, "I don't anticipate inflation is going to be a problem." Now she says, "I'm ready to retire the word transitory." What went wrong? "Big corporations have taken ad- vantage," says Rep. Ted Lieu. Sen. Elizabeth Warren tweeted: "greedy corporations are charging Americans extra." It's "price goug- ing." This is nonsense. "Greed is constant," says econ- omist David Henderson in my new video. "If it's greed, how do we ex- plain prices falling? " When oil pric- es fall, is it because "oil companies just suddenly decide, 'I'm gonna be less greedy'? " Prices change because of supply and demand. Inflation results "from too much money chasing too few goods," ex- plains Henderson. "If government's spending more money, that's more money chasing too few goods." Lately, government borrowed from the Fed, and spent much more mon- ey. Under President Donald Trump, the national debt rose $7.8 trillion. Under President Joe Biden, it's grown $2.2 trillion in just one year. Biden wants to spend even more — a record $ 6 trillion this year. Where will they get the money? Government has no money of its own, so increased spending means politi- cians must borrow more, tax more, or, easiest of all, create money out of thin air by just printing it. In the last few years, that's what they did. In an untested experiment, the Fed printed more money than ev- er in history. All this new money sloshing around the economy makes mon- ey we have less valuable. You notice the price increases, but you may not notice the damage inflation does to your savings. If you put $10,000 under your pil- low, 7 percent inflation will reduce that to $2,342 in just 20 years. If you were counting on those sav- ings for retirement, too bad. Most of your savings will be gone. Yet today's politicians want to spend even more. Biden claims his spending bills will "reduce inflation." "Biden's wrong," Henderson re- sponds. "There's no economic the- ory that says when the government spends a huge amount more money, prices fall." Some people want government to stop inflation by imposing price con- trols. That would be "horrible," says Henderson. Price controls were tried before. In 1971, President Richard Nixon or- dered a freeze on all prices. It sounded reasonable. Too much inflation? Our intuition tells us that government can fix that with a price freeze. But "that's where people's in- tuition goes wrong," says Henderson. Wrong because prices are not just money; they are also information. "Prices are signals ... that guide people," explains Henderson. "Mess that up, you've really messed up the economy." Price changes tell buyers what to avoid and sellers what to produce. When COVID-19 hit, the price of face masks rose sharply. Immediate- ly, producers made more. New Bal- ance switched from making footwear to making masks. Flexible pricing gets suppliers to produce what people really need. Now there are shortages of some products because COVID-19 inter- rupted supply chains. Price controls would make the shortages worse. Soon after Nixon froze prices, there were shortages of gasoline. I drove around, wasting gas, search- ing for gas stations that had it. "Price controls are like saying it's really cold and I'm going to solve that by breaking the thermometer," says Henderson. "It's actually worse than that because breaking the thermom- eter doesn't reduce the temperature, whereas price controls cause actual shortages! " Venezuela's price controls led to a The tally for how much the fed- eral government spent to combat COVID-19 is now estimated to be $5 trillion. It is more than the com- bined costs of World Wars I and II. The left is celebrating that politi- cians in Washington saved us. Real- ly? From what, exactly? Two years later, it is time for an honest assessment. Could things have worsened for the country if the government had spent nothing and done nothing? What would have hap- pened if we had not shut down our businesses? Our churches, schools and restaurants? Our parks, basket- ball courts and playgrounds? Would the public have made worse decisions regarding protecting its health and the health of its families and its employees than the politi- cians have made? The left believes it was govern- ment intervention that saved mil- lions of lives. But even with all the federal spending, some 879,000 (and counting) have perished from the vi- rus. It was politicians such as New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo whose aw- ful decision-making contributed to the deaths of thousands of seniors exposed to infected patients in nurs- ing homes. In addition, politicians didn't shut down the New York sub- way system for many weeks into the virus, costing thousands more avoid- able deaths. Suppose the government is here to save us. How do we explain the shameful malfeasance of the CDC, the FDA, the NIH and other gov- ernment medical agencies and pro- grams that spend roughly half a tril- lion dollars each year to keep us healthy? All of that money couldn't stop a virus from wreaking havoc on the country for two years and count- ing. Why was the CDC caught entire- ly unprepared to fight this virus? It would be like a town spending mil- lions of dollars a year on fire protection, and the first time there is a significant fire, the fire- fighters are all napping, no one slides down the poles and the fire en- gines won't start. So, what were Dr. Anthony Fauci and the rest of the experts at the CDC doing with the tens of billions of dollars we give them each year? They studied the health effects of liberal obses- sions such as climate change, racism and gun violence. What they weren't ready to do was their job: preparing for infectious diseases. Then there is the question of what Washington did with all the mon- ey. At least $2 trillion was given to workers and businesses to compen- sate them for the lockdowns that the government itself imposed. We now have pretty conclusive ev- idence from dozens of country and state studies that lockdowns were a highly ineffective way to combat the virus. Lockdowns may have saved some lives, but this response was the equivalent of trying to remove a tumor with a sledgehammer. Age-ad- justed death rates were no lower in states that shut down their econo- mies than states that stayed open. The rest of the money went to pay school districts even though the school doors were locked shut, to fund states and cities that closed their businesses, to fund mass tran- sit trains and buses that operated nearly empty, and worst of all, to fund hundreds of billions of dollars of welfare programs, such as expand- ed unemployment bene- fits, that paid workers to stay off the job. And mil- lions of workers still hav- en't come back. The one program that did work was President Donald Trump's Opera- tion Warp Speed. But the heart of that program was to find ways to pull end- runs around drug and vaccine regulations that hold up life- saving medicines for many years. As a result, private companies such as Pfizer invented the vaccines in re- cord time because the government stayed out of the way. We are still paying a high price for President Joe Biden's screw-ups as we deal with the less deadly omi- cron variant. Late last year, Biden's Department of Health and Human Services stopped all shipments of an effective COVID-19 treatment by Regeneron because a CDC mod- el concluded wrongly that the delta variant had disappeared. Thanks to that blunder, many thousands died or were hospitalized because the gov- ernment denied them treatment. Other promising therapies, such as by GlaxoSmithKline, have run into regulatory hurdles preventing or de- laying their use. Wouldn't it have been more com- petent and more humane to let doc- tors and patients make these deci- If asked, most Americans probably believe the U.S. and Russia are pret- ty evenly matched on nuclear weap- ons due to arms control treaties such as the New Strategic Arms Reduc- tion Treaty—aka New START. That's not exactly correct. Indeed, with Russia threatening a large-scale invasion of Ukraine at any moment, now is a good time to take note of a little-spoken-of, but glaring, imbalance in our nuclear ar- senals—and how it could affect our interests in Europe. While the U.S. and Russia have a similar number of deployed strate- gic (i.e., high-yield) nuclear weapons as limited under New START, Rus- sia has a 10 :1 advantage over us in nonstrategic (i.e., low-yield) nucle- ar weapons—aka tactical or battle- field nukes. Yes, you read that right: a 10 :1 ad- vantage. Today, while open-source num- bers are fuzzy, Russia has about 2,000 nonstrategic nuclear weapons, while the U.S. has about 200 total— with half in the U.S. and half in Eu- rope as part of NATO. OK, so what? No one is ever going to use nukes anyway, right? Well, major nuclear weapons states, including Russia, have said that a nuclear war should never be fought. But there are deep con- cerns among security analysts about whether the Russians really believe that. Russia is believed to have what is called an "escalate to deescalate" doctrine for its battlefield nukes. In- deed, this doctrine might be better called "escalate to terminate—and win." The idea is Russia might em- ploy one (or more) tactical nuclear weapon during a conventional con- flict with NATO forces to prevent a defeat, consolidate gains, or even freeze a conflict in place without further fighting. Because the disparity between Russian and U.S. tactical nuclear weapons is so large, Moscow may perceive a NATO nucle- ar response to lack cred- ibility. An example here is helpful. Moscow attacks one—or all— of the Baltic States with its conven- tional forces to establish control over some or all of these nations' territory. Invoking Article V, NATO responds with conventional forces—and the battle ensues. Moscow, concerned about the in- feriority of its military in this fight with U.S.-led NATO, contemplates exploding a low-yield nuclear weap- on somewhere in theater as a warn- ing of worse things to come. In Moscow's eyes, perhaps NATO will become concerned about the es- calation of the fighting from the con- ventional to the nuclear—especially Russia's potential use of more power- ful nuclear weapons against Europe- an and American cities—and pause its counteroffensive against Russian forces. Indeed, Moscow may misperceive that if NATO does not have the tac- tical nuclear capabilities to respond in kind, it would likelier back down than launch a high-yield, strategic weapon at Moscow and risk further escalation. Hanging on to its advantage, Mos- cow can threaten additional nuclear strikes unless fighting ends on Rus- sia's terms. In Russia's ideal world, NATO might decide that there is no good option available to respond and decides to cease hostilities, lock- ing in Moscow's ill-got- ten gains. With these calcula- tions in mind, Russia takes the gamble and explodes a 10 -kiloton nuclear weapon in the European theater, and nuclear deterrence fails for the first time in his- tory. So, what does nuclear conflict with NATO have to do with Ukraine? If Russia perceives itself suc- cessful in its latest adventurism in Ukraine it could certainly embold- en Moscow to try to expand Rus- sia's sphere of influence in Europe, including by attacking NATO mem- bers. Indeed, Moscow's advantage in nonstrategic nuclear weapons could encourage greater risk-taking now and in the future, deeply undermin- ing European security and U.S. in- terests. As we have seen so far—from in- formation campaigns to cyberat- tacks to military movements—Rus- sia will use every tool in its kit to achieve its geopolitical goals. That approach could include the use of tactical nukes at some point against NATO—meaning these so- called small Russian nukes are a po- tential big problem for us and our al- lies. Peter Brookes researches and de- velops Heritage's policy on weapons of mass destruction and counter pro- liferation. Race for the Cure By Star Parker Give Me a Break John Stossel Eye on the Economy By Stephen Moore Greatest government failure in American History Letter Heritage Viewpoint By Peter Brookes Russia's small nukes are a big problem See FAILURE on page 5 See INFLATION on page 5 See R ACE on page 5 Court