To the Editor:

The recent debt-ceiling debate allowed for an exquisite view of the hypocrisy and incompetence of a group of people whose only real training in life is to assure their own re-election to public office.

Whether you are a member of the tea party or the Democratic Party, you were sold out and duped by the resolution of the “crisis.” The deficit, which is now $14 trillion, will rise to $26 trillion within 10 years.

Without the round-the-clock, week-long effort of the 535 statesmen who rule our nation from the halls of Congress, the deficit would have climbed to $28 trillion. They tout this sorry result as having saved the future. There is no tax reform from the acknowledged inefficient and currently unfair system and no real spending relief, i.e., the deficit is growing at 7 percent. What do you own that is worth 7 percent more this year than last: house, car, the dollar in your pocket? Did you get a 7-percent raise? All that has risen more than 7 percent is your property taxes. They are up 10 percent.

America is the loser. America. Not the president and not the Congress. We’re not them. They are certainly not us. Even the laws they write for us do not apply to them.

We hear over and over that Bush brought us to this impasse. Well he did. The Bush presidency was a disaster for Americans: two wars, a deeply flawed educational initiative, an unaffordable prescription drug entitlement, more regulation and profligate spending. However, rather than doing anything to redress the Bush errors, Mr. Obama has embraced them and used them as a springboard to open a third theater of war, a bone-crushing health-care policy, more waste in education, additional regulation and further spending. These guys are a joke, and so are their supporters and apologists.

As to Mr. Obama’s assertion that added taxes are long overdue: We have had a tax increase! A very big one. There has been an enormous “shadow” tax levied by the Federal Reserve’s open-market operations.

These FED policies have artificially driven interest rates to historically low levels and have correspondingly lessened the government’s interest payments to bondholders. This has reduced the amount of interest earned by the nation’s savers by hundreds of billions of dollars. These lowered interest payments, which the government has garnered as a cost benefit for itself, have been used to fund the bloated spending of the last three years. In effect, there has been a “stealth” tax increase levied upon the country’s savers without any tax bill ever having been proposed or voted upon. Savers have been paid less than market returns on investments so that federal spending could be redirected to the pork barrel of failed government programs.

President Obama wants these added taxes not to remedy the ridiculous mess left by eight years of Bush, but rather to create a base from which to leverage more debt-driven overspending just as Mr. Bush did.

WARREN SMITH
Washington