Policies – Manganaro for Congress

Let’s Address the Issues Facing Pennsylvanians

Fiscal Responsibility & the Federal Deficit

The federal deficit is growing faster than the economy — a trajectory that is mathematically unsustainable.

Outstanding Federal debt has grown from 52% of GDP to over 120%, since 1990.

Whether it was because of fear of bank failure contagion in 2008, COVID-19 in 2020, misplaced hope when enacting the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in 2021, or reacting with “sympathy” after creating an immigrant wave of record proportions, Democrats in Congress have used emotional arguments to explain the history of bad decisions.

If the current way of doing business is not sustainable, it must change, or it will lead to a national bankruptcy. While the charts are shocking as they are, they do not include off-balance sheet liabilities, such as Social Security, Medicare, Railroad Retirement, or Black Lung, among others.

Mary Gay Scanlon regularly voted to increase Federal spending, leading to over $2 trillion annual deficits for most years since her election until the beginning of Trump’s second term.

My Positions:

Work across the aisle on a credible path to balance the budget and for long-term solvency
Demand rigorous oversight of all federal disbursements to close fraud loopholes
Require both cost/benefit analysis before passage of bills and audits of expenditures post-passage
Oppose new entitlement expansions that widen the structural deficit

The Cost of Living

Graph showing the Consumer Price Index, Jan 1990 to Feb 2026

Everyone is hurt by inflation.

From the beginning of 1990, it took over 29 years for prices to double. Since April 2019, prices are up almost 29%, 21% of which happened during the Biden Administration, and approximately 4% in Trump’s second term so far.

Apart from the blame game, it is important to recognize that prices in the US do not typically go down once they’ve gone up. If prices don’t go down, the only way to make living more affordable is to raise inflation-adjusted income. The most effective way to do that is to welcome high value-added manufacturers and the jobs and wages they provide.

That’s a good start, but it is a solution that assumes all else is unchanged. Another factor that has made life less affordable in District 5 is that local and state taxes have been going up quickly while general inflation has been rising. While Pennsylvanians are dealing with high inflation, it is shocking that the Council of the county where most of the citizens of District 5 reside has decided to ignore the economic pain those citizens are going through and to add to their difficulties by increasing their cost of living, and housing specifically.

In Delaware County the real estate tax rates have gone up 53% in three years! Whose income has gone up at that rate? Not many.

While the tax rates have gone up rapidly, the increased cost of housing is making it difficult for many to find affordable housing. The median sale price of a house in Delaware County has gone up over 30% since 2020, driven in part by the Covid-19 inspired exodus from Philadelphia starting late 2020. Another factor in housing demand that ramped up at the beginning of 2021 was the demand for government-supplied housing for large numbers of immigrants invited into the country by the Biden administration.

A recent study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas found that the immigration policies from 2021 to 2024 were responsible for roughly 30% of the increase in the prices for houses and 20% of the increase in rents during that period.

Pennsylvanians need public servants that respect them, not abuse them.

America First Means Avoiding Foreign Entanglements

The nation was promised no foreign wars, and no forever wars. So much for that.

The Iran Excursion is a war of opportunity. Iran was having economic problems and had a population that seemed ready to attempt an uprising.

Iran was in an historically weakened state and deemed unlikely to survive an uprising when President Trump authorized an attack.

I hope the excursion is of short duration and that the loss of human lives is minimized, but I am not convinced that this was a necessary conflict.

However, the US Is now in this fight. Our military is very good at blowing up high-value targets, but it has not proved itself good at ending engagement in a timely manner and creating a peaceful international partner as the end-state.

I support funding current operations to improve the odds of a peaceful resolution. Nonetheless, I hope this situation can be quickly resolved through a negotiated settlement of hostilities.

Mary Gay Scanlon has voted against increased funding for the Pentagon during her term as Congresswoman.

America First Means Protecting Americans

Americans are becoming victims in places where they should be safe, like the street, stores, and public transit.

Every day there are more incidents, some more well known than others, but none of which needed to happen.
Throats cut. Elderly men pushed in front of trains. Young women raped. People killed, with suspects seen on cameras, arrested and released by courts over and over.
Many of those in action on video were recently given entry to our country with little to no vetting.
Those and others have been offered a way to self-deport and avoid interactions with the legal system and ICE by using the CBP app. Many have not.

Mary Gay Scanlon opposes using the Federal employees of ICE and Customs and Border Protection from enforcing the laws enacted by Congress to remove such perpetrators from within our country.
She regularly opines about the perceived evils of these law enforcement agencies but ignores the harm done by those here without documentation. She boycotted the State of the Union address to “protest” the activities of thousands of Federal agents who are working to protect the citizens of this Republic.

I support ICE’s continuing efforts to remove criminals and to reduce the amount of fentanyl entering our country.
ICE, working with the FBI, have located over 150,000 children who were trafficked into America during the Biden Administration.
Removing criminals and locating trafficked children should not be controversial.

Now that there are military actions overseas in countries set against us with hostile intent, ICE and CPB operations have become even more important. The Department of Homeland Security was created to coordinate intelligence gathering, stop bad actors, and track down possible sleeper cells. Congress has been grandstanding about ICE carrying out the duties that were set out for them.

I support the passage and enforcement of H.R. 1958 – Deporting Fraudsters Act.

Equal Rights & Equal Treatment Under the Law

I believe the laws of the land should be applied evenly to all citizens based on shared, inalienable rights.

I am distressed that certain district courts seem to be making biased judgements based on Critical Race Theory, i.e. that certain alleged perpetrators are in fact the victims of society at large. They have been favoring the alleged criminal, based on extra-legal, government imputation of categories of “oppression” to the criminal for his or her benefit while ignoring actual harm to the victim.

Courts should practice blind justice to protect and provide remedies for people harmed physically or monetarily in the course of crimes.

Congress has the power to modify the structure of the courts.

I support impeaching judges who free offenders who commit murder after multiple arrests and reduced, or no sentences post-conviction.

Reproductive Rights

I respect the ruling in the Dobbs v. Jackson case by the Supreme Court.
From the PA State website: “Under Pennsylvania law, abortions are legal through the end of the 23rd week of pregnancy, and can occur after that time when the health of the pregnant woman is in danger.”

Energy Policy

Pennsylvania is blessed to have huge reserves of hydrocarbon-based energy resources.

Despite that reality, Gov. Josh Shapiro entered into the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) which hampered the ability of Pennsylvania energy companies to sell to the region and nation. It shackled the US to international sources for “green” energy technology such as fragile imported windmills and China-sourced solar panels.

Gov. Shapiro is pushing for another plan to make electricity scarce now that his funding from the “Inflation Reduction Act” has been cut off.

Solar power can provide localized power relatively effectively, but large-scale solar operations have large geographical footprints. The power from solar installations is dependent on the sun shining and is produced more efficiently in plants closer to the equator than those in Pennsylvania. Getting the power from the installations into the general power grid requires conditioning to avoid causing problems with transmission efficiency. Local battery storage can also smooth out the flow from the installation when the panels are not producing power.

I think America can do better by using its oil reserves wisely in the near-term while developing next-generation baseload nuclear energy plants as recommended under the Reactor Pilot Program to provide a low-carbon source of abundant power for homes and industry. Some of the large-scale water-cooled reactors designs under consideration are fueled with thorium (which are safer than those that are uranium-fueled), uranium fuel with higher fuel enrichment levels than earlier designs. Other large reactors under development are to be cooled with liquid sodium.

Small modular reactors are also under development and are going through the permitting process. One company’s prototype recently “went critical”, meaning it produced a fission reaction in its containment vessel. Implementation is going to take years, but probably not decades for these smaller and easier to site units.

Since fission reactors generate radioactive waste, fusion reactors continue to be the goal for the future. Research is on-going, but the technology implementation is coming into view as various containment and concentration techniques are designed and tested.

SE Pennsylvania needs an all-of-the-above energy policy.

Environmental Policy

My view on environmental issues has been shaped by growing up in the country in Chester County. The air was clean. The water came from a well.

While I support developing Pennsylvania’s petrochemical resources, I also support setting requirements and monitoring drilling, fracking and transporting these resources carefully.

Along with the development of new power generation technologies, comes the need to deal with the spent fuel in greater quantities.

Restrictions on agricultural run-off should be maintained and evaluated for adequacy.

Protection of flood zones and riparian barriers around flowing water is necessary to provide a safe environment for our citizens and our aquatic neighbors.

Nullification

Philadelphia, Delaware County, and Montgomery County have passed laws precluding local law enforcement officers from coordinating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a division of the Department of Homeland Security.

Nullification, the practice of states and municipalities choosing to ignore federal laws, was a prime motivator of the Civil War. An estimated 360,000 Union troops died in the conflict to put an end to the first major nullification project by the Democrat-led Southern states.

You might expect that Democrats would have enough awareness to know nullification was not a good idea then. It is still a bad idea. It is also unlawful.

I understand that the office holders may have their own opinions about immigration laws, but local authorities have no role to nullify national laws.

They should be held accountable.

Education

The Gov. Shapiro’s budget proposes over $200 million for public schools in southeast PA. While this will generally be reported as good news, and it may be, we must reflect on what strings come with those funds. Although Gov. Shapiro ran as a supporter of school choice, he has blocked efforts to implement any variety of this policy, whether developed and passed by the Pennsylvania legislature or support offered from the Federal budget.

In the current environment, parents of students in public schools must be diligent in monitoring the curriculum and texts selected by the school administration. That is a challenge equivalent to having a second job and will result in the uncertainty that they may have missed something about choices their children are making at school, books added to the school library, or pedology that exalts practices of marginal groups. Parents’ rights should include having access to funding the school district allocates per child, whether for use in homeschooling or in private schools, perhaps with caps related to parents’ income percentile.

Another issue with public education in the Commonwealth, but also nationally, is that the boys’ and young men’s educational needs are often treated as if they are subordinate to girls and young women because they develop at different rates and, thus, have different requirements from a learning environment. This has long lasting effects, with those young men lagging in entry into higher education, and from there into well-paying professional careers. A follow-on effect is that too many young men feel alienated from the economy and hopeless about the future.
This is a national problem that should be addressed in the school system, and both state and national funds should be used for that.

Insurance Is Not Healthcare

People were having problems getting and paying for health care before the so-called Affordable Care Act (ACA). Despite the disruption of the entire healthcare industry, most of those same problems remain. Instead of fixing the issues that were extant, the ACA led to doctors shutting individual and group practices and becoming employees of major hospital systems.

The hospital systems are even more concentrated in densely populated areas than the doctors’ practices were, leaving rural residents underserved.

The ACA set reporting requirements for services provided that have led to imbalanced growth in personnel between the ballooning of administrative jobs and under-investment in doctors who are now limited to patient visits of 15 or 20 minutes. The relationship of knowledge and trust between patients and doctors has been shattered.

I am not a health insurance expert, but I can see that giving patients more control of their healthcare spending in free markets would go a long way to allocating resources more efficiently.

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