Dear Editor,
Help me with some objectivity, if you can find any today.
The details of the budget deal are unfolding mighty quick and each hour divulges another almost unthinkable action.
Here’s how I see it:
Our government cuts taxes for very rich people.
Our government not only fails to collect taxes from GE and others, we give them additional money.
Our government conducts wars and various other military operations around the globe with funding from some enormous VISA card we get billed for.
So we don’t tax rich people and rich corporations at the same rate we tax everybody else.
We provide welfare to our richest fat-cat corporations, and we maintain a whopping failure of a set of expensive military operations on oil-rich areas to get some sort of leverage on petroleum — and the price of gas just zooms to the stratosphere — and we have the most amorous tax arrangements imaginable for corporations and they still out source jobs to Honduras.
However, our government just arrived at a deal to cut WIC, cut heating oil assistance for the poor, cut HIV medical help, cut funds for education, cut police, cut fire departments, cut everything we have a right to expect from our government.
And then I get this e-mail from Move On, an organization I have kept faith with for some time, and they are promoting, as an affective course of action, a hunger strike!
They proudly announced many “progressive” members of Congress will skip a meal or two.
What are we to do?
Please give me some of your brain for just a few moments. Because, the deal cut on Friday night is only good for a few hours more.
And, only a few hours old, it has begun to smell very much like a lumpy wet brown paper bag, lit on fire and placed on everyone’s doorstep.
I write to all my elected officials often — except the ones from Kansas, because, I mean, why?
I just moved to Kansas but I clearly get it.
I would do anything to affect a change. But I have no good idea what to do.
Come on guys.
Share with me some ideas on what a citizen can do now.
John Grow,
Great Bend