Posted by
Mike Silverman on Friday, September 26, 2008 12:05:55 PM
President Bush is a great man, and in the past has been a great leader for this nation in times of national crisis, such as the terror attacks on 9/11/2001. President Bush loves this country and the people. When he took the oval office from Clinton I personally breathed a sigh of relief that we had integrity restored to the Presidency. For me to criticize President Bush , my opposition must be truly so strident that I can find no common ground with his stated policy. So it is... I have a profound practical and ideological disagreement with President Bush's approach to the resolution of some economic strife that has been causing some very large banks and finance companies to fall, or at least teeter on the brink. My world view is one of a Conservative approach to fiscal and social matters. When President Bush holds a conference in front of a window on the world and states that we are on the brink of disaster I have no doubt that he believes it. But when he tells us.. the people of the United States, that the disaster is the failure of banks that have made ( or been forced by bad regulations to make...) bad loan decisions.. and that there is no time to wait, debate, argue or discuss any other approach to fixing this problem excepting the direct infusion of 700+ billion dollars of this country's taxpayer money into a machine to be operated by one man, Secretary of the Treasury, to buy up bad/defaulted/foreclosed loans from private companies... I have to put my foot down on the brake. There is something intuitively wrong with that single-minded narrowly focused view of a fix. Conservatism demands a pull back and re-examination of this problem. An attempt has been made to frighten the nation into a rash, uncertain and ( in many people's opinion..) ill-advised move to trust the federal government to fix an economic fallout that as yet.... has not been "proven" to be without optional approaches, and has not been proven to be the end of the United States economy, and has not been proven to be beyond free market methods of correction. Everyone in this country is overtaxed. That includes those making over, and under, $250,000 a year. Congress can only do one thing, appropriate and spend money. How much of it they spend, is up to you and me. That's right. We are not powerless mimes in a play being hosted by the federal government. Quite the opposite. They don't go to Capitol Hill unless we give them permission. That's why our Senators and Representatives get very nervous when their phone lines start ringing off the hook with irate voters calling them, and thier email systems break down under a tidal wave of angry constituents making thier presence felt. They can go to DC and play with our tax money , but when we start putting the heat on them , reminding them that this is not a game..., it's a very sobering moment for them. That's one of the reasons, right now, that the proposed 700+ billion dollar bailout machine has stalled. Because "we" are mad as hell, and we're not going to let them get away with another government tax-funded boondoggle. The citizens of our country are ANGRY. WE are putting the squeeze on this deal by rattling the cages of our local representatives and letting them know we don't like this at all. The best alternative, in my opinion, is a complete elimination of the capital gains tax. When our government no longer punishes you for making investment profits, investments will sky rocket like never before. Cut the payroll tax in half, and you will see new jobs grow like never before. There are so many positive, uplifting ways to move this economy without creating a new 700 billion dollar bureaucracy, and they all take the form of LESS GOVERNMENT involvement.
- Mike Silverman, Milford MA