To the Editor:
When I read in the Steve and Cokie Roberts column in the Sunday (11/11) edition of  the WDN that it’s time for the truth about taxes and benefits I presumed they meant the whole truth.
Instead what we got was partial truths. They told us that “Mitt Romney said that lowering taxes and cutting regulations would magically create new profits and comfortable surpluses.” That was pretty close. Actually I don’t remember “magically” or “comfortable” in any of the Romney pronouncements, but I’m not going to make a big issue out of that. What I do take exception to is that they left out the part about closing loopholes that tend to be used predominately by the wealthy which I would suppose would increase the amounts of tax they pay without raising the rates.
They then quote the Prez as saying that he has been offering the Republicans for a very long time $2.50 worth of program cuts for every dollar in tax increases. Although I’ve heard various amounts of cuts offered I will not quarrel with the $2.50 number. Nor will question whether it has been offered or not. I believe it has. What I do quarrel with is the fact that the increases being offered come at the beginning of a 10 year period and the cuts come at the end of the 10 year period.
If the Prez is unable to negate the XXII amendment with an Executive Order there would seem to be a fairly good chance that by the time we get to the latter part of the 10 year window, he will be long since retired back to Chicago or wherever. Steve and Cokie somehow managed to overlook that. We can only wonder if the offer would stay on the table if the cuts were at the beginning of the period and the tax increases were at the end.
It seems to me that with columnists like these and headline writers like we find at the WDN, you really don’t need to bother writing editorials.
JIM BISPO
Belhaven