The American Spectator

Reader Mail

Not So Fast

10.1.08 @ 12:01AM

(Page 3 of 3)

WE'RE NOT GONNA TAKE IT
Re: Jeremy Lott's Quibbling Over Principle:

What the pompous ignorant so-and-so's in Washington, D.C. don't realize is that amongst us clingers to our guns and religion there is an American ideological revolution going on. "Us'ns 'taint taking no mo'."
-- Mike DeVita
Fly-over country

DEMOCRATIC DISASTER
Re: John Berlau's Doing Something?

This latest financial crisis, like the one Reagan inherited with the Savings and Loan debacle, is a shining example why the Founders of this nation feared a democracy form of government vs. a Constitutional Republican one. They tried to put in place checks and balances to temper what had happened countless times before in history when the masses vote their emotions. Lest I forget the obvious, but we haven't been that latter form of government for a long time, decades in fact.

While everyone has their favorite scapegoat and some will point to the spending spree we've been on for the last eight years or even the other fiction about Clinton having a balanced budget and "surplus" in fact, the painful truth is that we've been running a deficit on paper since Social Security went into effect. Everything that has followed has just piled on to that be it Medicare/Medicaid or Prescription Drug programs. The latter are just extensions to Social Security since before these programs your Social Security and "other" retirement income had to cover your medical bills. By whatever name you wish to call these programs, no amount of lipstick is going to change what is underneath the makeup, a cradle to grave welfare program that I've been paying 50% more into since my parents' rate highest and all these programs are going bankrupt in time. If you doubt that you haven't looked at the actuary math and all the times the first two programs have been bailed out with tax rate and range increases, etc. The next two-three generations are going to have to pay 50% higher rates also to pay me my minimum wage existence just like all those that have come before....

At this junction, the current crisis is probably smaller than the S&L bailout adjusted for inflation but the average tax burden is much higher in real terms. Both Reagan and Bush 43 have tried to "grow" us out of this. There are limits to that in the real business world and when half your population has an inexhaustible desire for more and more socialism, domestic spending always outstrips growth. Always.

This is how great societies die. They first start living a lie and believing they can invent their own financial rules and repeal the Law of Diminishing Return. Then they stop being the people who built the Nation in the first place and forget why that is important. I don't know if this is our last "party," as the fool Nancy Pelosi says, but it is another brick or two added to our weight while trying to tread some really deep water. I can't predict the future and I don't know of anyone that can either but the past is a pretty good indication of where we are headed if FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) runs amok in the next few months. Wall Street financials have some blame in this situation but the ultimate responsibility and accountability rests with the foolish people that took out ridiculous mortgages on inflated property values with severely discounted rates that were enabled by moron government policies going back to the late seventies. Of course this is exactly why democracies die. No one is ever held accountable for their decisions and thus society at large bears a greater and greater burden until the Nation collapses.
-- Thom Bateman
Newport News, Virginia

FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE
Re: Mike Dooley's letter (under "Right Into My Trap") in Reader Mail's Greenlight Special:

I offer this difference between liberals and conservatives:

Conservatives think that liberals have terrible ideas.

Liberals feel that conservatives are terrible people.
-- David Gonzalez
Wheeling, Illinois

Letter to the Editor

topics:
Taxes, Transportation, Trade, Barack Obama, Sarah Palin, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Business, Social Security, Medicaid, Religion, Constitution, Law, Socialism, Immigration, Energy, Alaska, Medicare