This is a letter I sent to Senator Dick Durbin:

Dear Senator Durbin,

You mentioned on Face the Nation on Sunday, 7/17/11, that the national debt rose somewhat substantially under President Reagan.  In order for that comment to gain traction it would be necessary for people who lived through the Reagan Administration years to forget about the very noble mission he was on.  And for the younger people it would have to depend on them not doing their homework to enlighten them what Reagan had done.  The SDI program was a costly one but it did result in bringing about a victorious end to the cold war (or did at least reduce the Soviets to a whimper).  According to Wikipedia the public debt truly did raise from $712B to $2T in the Reagan years and a year after he left office we saw the Berlin Wall come tumbling down.  It would be hard to believe that any loyal American wasn’t happy to see that happen.

Today’s spending mania makes Reagan’s pale by comparison.  There IS justification for being involved in two of the three wars we’re engaged in.  But there are things we hear about here and there that make us wonder - such as research being done with shrimp on walking machines and subsidies being given to companies such as GE who made 14B in profits in 2010 and paid no taxes.  There are other examples.

Under President Bush the gross public debt rose from 5.7T in January 2001 to 10.7T by 12/2008.  Under President Obama the debt increased from 10.7T to 14.2T by 2/2011 – an increase of 3.5 trillion in 25 months.  The war in Iraq HAS been a justifiable cause and to rid the terrorists from a safe haven in Afghanistan is important.  I can’t believe that any of us aren’t happy to see the end of the monster Saddam Hussein and his serial rapist sons.  Not even a beautiful young bride walking with her husband was safe from falling prey to them.  The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan also had the effect of having the cowardly lion in Libya scrapping his nuclear weapons program, fearful of being the next one the coalition would be going after. 

But the sad thing about this whole spending debate is that it should be taking place at all.  With the wealth of resources God has graced this great land with we should be the richest, debt free nation on the planet if we would get to work seriously developing these treasures instead of being beholden to foreign nations, some of whom are not even friendly to us.  Would we be in the mess we’re in now if we had not fallen prey to the economic attack the oil producing nations waged on us in 2008 that we put our reliance on?  Does it make sense that we should be giving two billion dollars to Brazil to drill a 10,000 foot deep well in the Gulf of Mexico while President Obama’s agents refuse to issue permits to our own oil companies who would be putting our own people to work?  Are we to believe that they can mine that oil in a more environmentally safe way than we can?  What about the revenue that would be coming into the treasury from the wage earners and the businesspeople who would be paying taxes on these earnings?      

Sincerely,

Jack West

  

       

Kudos to Tom Donahue

This is a copy of a letter I sent to Neil Cavuto:

Dear Neil,

Kudos to Tom Donohue, the President and CEO of the Chamber of Commerce, who was being interviewed on your time segment of Fox News at 4:30 PM Monday 7/12. I am in full agreement and have been touting for a long time what he was saying. We would have the richest, debt free nation on the planet if we would make use of the vast resources of this land of milk and honey that God has graced us with. And we have the people with the skills that can tap that wealth in an environmentally friendly way. Hopefully we’ll someday get the people we need to wrest this nation from the grip of the fools who are preventing us from using these resources.

Donohue also made good sense of the way to raise revenue. He left one important thing out. We often forget the most obvious thing. I was waiting for him to mention that when we get people working they pay taxes on their income and the businessman/woman they work for prospers, pays taxes commensurate with this income and enables the business to grow and take on other tax paying employees.

Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi and their confederates think it’s a clever mantra to use the phrase “tax breaks for the rich.” If they had their way they’d take all the working capital away from the job providers. I’m a retired construction electrician who made a good living in New York and I never begrudged Donald Trump getting richer with all the construction work he did in New York, providing me and so many other tradesmen with good livings. We didn’t have the capital. We provided the labor. Trump and other people like him provided the capital and thank God they did. They could have simply retired to a life of leisure on some vacation island somewhere. Thanks too that they kept that energy up and still do.

Tax cuts bring economic growth

I don't know what kind of history Senator Dick Durbin is studying.  The Bush tax cuts during the early days of his time in office brought about 54 months of economic growth and five percent unemployment.  It was when the Democrats took over vetoproof control of the economy in January 2007 following the 2006 elections that the economy started to go south.  Would Senator Durbin take all of the investment capital out of the hands of the people who create the jobs?  Four different presidents in the past fifty years stimulated the growth of the economy when taxes encroached to levels that the economy was being choked - Kennedy, Reagan, Clinton (When he adopted Newt's Contract With America Program) and G. W. Bush.   Employment figures began to go up and revenues flowed into the treasury.  As Casey Stengel always used to say, "Ya can look it up."