I’m sorry, Mr. President, but talking about the government cutting spending in the midst of a recession is the wrong message. ("Obama: Agencies may not fill vacancies", DMN 10/16/2010) Adding to the unemployment numbers by cutting government hiring does nothing but add your voice to the already crazy voices that suggest the government is just a family on steroid. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Families are rarely employers and never employers of last resort. Government is both. In fact, government is the greatest single purchaser of goods and services. At a time when the private sector has already lost so many customers, you want to cut back on their best? How is that wise?
I’m sorry, Mr. President, but talking about the government cutting spending in the midst of a recession is the wrong message. ("Obama: Agencies may not fill vacancies", DMN 10/16/2010) Adding to the unemployment numbers by cutting government hiring does nothing but add your voice to the already crazy voices that suggest the government is just a family on steroid. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Families are rarely employers and never employers of last resort. Government is both. In fact, government is the greatest single purchaser of goods and services. At a time when the private sector has already lost so many customers, you want to cut back on their best? How is that wise?
Responding to the "anger" of the Tea Party is, with all due respect, a fool’s errand. You do not help people who are angry because they are suffering from the consequences of self-defeating policies by telling them to keep pursing self-defeating policies. Throwing water on a drowned man is no solution. We are in this crisis, in the short term, because government had failed to regulate the financial industry but, long-term, because 30 years ago it stopped repairing and upgrading the nation’s infrastructure, choosing instead to cut taxes so that we have to borrow money to pay our bills. Conservative borrow and spend to enable tax breaks for millionaires have displaced liberal tax and spend on infrastructure and quality of life issues of average citizens. This is why we are in this mess. People, who are angry about potholes while simultaneously wanting to cut government spending, are out of touch with reality and should not be encouraged in their thinking by the President. Your allies out here beyond the beltway are fighting this insanity every day. Don’t make it harder for us!
Don’t fuel the Tea Party insanity by legitimizing the counterproductive GOP economic policies that got us into this mess. Every dollar spent by the government goes into some private company’s income stream. [The Swiss just finished digging the world’s longest tunnel to enable the expansion of high-speed rail in Europe and we "cannot afford" a tunnel between New Jersey and Manhattan Island. What is wrong with this picture?] The last thing businesses, small and large, need is for their best customer to cut back on purchases. Stop worrying about inflation and start worrying about deflation, but most importantly STAY ON MESSAGE! Keynesian policies work; GOP/Tea Party austerity doesn’t! We need to be smarter as a nation. Joining the chorus of the policy-challenged is not the way to a smarter electorate.
Respectfully yours,