As I see it! (Guest Commentary)

A friend of mine made the mistake of watching a Republican apologist being interviewed on a Sunday morning talk show yesterday (August 5).  When the interview was over, he wrote a rebuttal, just to vent, and sent it to me.  I asked if I could publish it, and he agreed:

I find it amazing that voters in the US can’t remember what happened in 2008!  The “Ship of State” was badly damaged by the Bush administration.  In late 2007, as our economic condition got worse every day, President Bush seemed to be on television almost every other day, begging the American people to fund the bailout of the banks and Wall Street.  So, when Mr. Obama was elected, the Congress did just that.  Yep, we spent money on ourselves.  Gosh, think of that – we did not send money overseas; we did not give it away as “aid” to other countries.  We gave it to ourselves.  We returned taxpayer dollars to the American public.

Yes, a trillion dollars went back into American hands!  Yes, it was called the “stimulus.”  And just who do you think was the target of that stimulus?  It was the American people.  Could we let the banks just fail?  Could we let the auto industry fail?  Even with the stimulus we saw many small and medium banks fail.  We saw other banks in a mad rush to foreclose on homeowners.  We said goodbye to the Saturn division of General Motors.  Small stores closed as Wal-Mart started to dominate the country, filling our homes with goods from China.  Are you ready for this – the government of China loaned us money so that we could buy goods from them!  Talk about a stimulus that worked!!

So, where are we today?  Did we spend enough on America?  Do we need to spend more?  Do we need to cut spending?  If we cut spending, then be prepared to see more money flow from the wealthy families of America to overseas accounts.  Make no mistake, money sent to overseas accounts benefits the country in which it was deposited.  Those countries then loan that money back to us, but at a high rate of interest and not to everybody!  Where is the intelligence in that type of transaction?  Making money in this country and then sending it overseas to “protect” it hurts all of us.  We need to control that type of business.  Money sent out of the country needs to be taxed.

I think it’s funny that the Republicans in the House of Representatives want to tax the money that “illegals” are sending home (i.e., sending money overseas), but when it comes to rich Americans sending money overseas for “protection,” they are silent on the issue!  What hypocrisy, what daring, what shameful meddling with the minds of the American voters!  Vote Republican in the fall – if you want to see the same people in charge of government as we had under the Bush administration (“You’re doing a great job, Brownie!”), if you want to see the country rot out some more.  Or, hold your nose and vote for Obama.  He was put in charge of the battered Ship of State in 2008 and since then he has righted the ship and we have weathered the storm.

We are out of the hospital and on crutches.  Is it time now for us to hobble back to the hospital and fire the doctor?  I say, NO!  Now we must move forward to rebuilding the infrastructure of this country.  Roads, dams, power grids, power plants, water distribution systems, just about anything that you can think of in the public sector, need to brought up to date.  No fast trains in America – let’s build them.  Electricity going out every time there is a thunderstorm?  Let’s take care of that.  Not enough energy to support ourselves?  Let’s take care of that also.  We need to spend money on infrastructure in our own country, not in Iraq or Afghanistan; but need to spend it here on small businesses that will take care of the above problems!

Yes – let’s get the job done.  Spend our tax dollars on ourselves.  Wow!  What a concept!  Put our tax money back in our pockets.  Has that ever worked?  Ask President Eisenhower, oops, you can’t, he is not around anymore.  But look what he did for the country when his administration decided to spend the tax money here in America.  They built the interstate road system.  Have you driven on one of those roads?  Yes, they are fast, they are wonderful, but they are also getting old.  The solution is simple.  Don’t raise IRS taxes on the rich!   Just put a heavy tax on the money that wealthy people are sending out of the country.  Put them in the same boat as illegal aliens.   Say NO to sending money to Swiss banks, to Cayman Islands banks, to the parents back home in South America.  We need the money here in America. Let the wealthy send money overseas only after they have paid a high tax for the privilege of undermining America.  Let the illegals send money home to the family, but make them pay a price for doing so.  For once we need to come to the realization that money spent on ourselves is not money wasted.  It is money invested in our future!

Are we in debt as a country? Yes we are.  Can we get out of debt?  Of course we can.  If you don’t think we can get out of debt, then don’t vote in November.  If you think we should not spend money on ourselves, then what are we going to spend money on?   Let’s get out of debt by rebuilding the country, not by buying new toys for the Defense Department.  Instead of spending money on weapons that will end up rusting away in some desert, let’s give it to American companies that will hire American workers to rebuild the country.  We don’t need any new wars.  We need new infrastructure.

We need to wake up!  We need to remember that the Revolutionary War was not about the Tax on Tea.  It was fought because we had no say in the matter.  We adopted the slogan, “No Taxation without Representation.”  Well, folks, we have representation now, we tax ourselves.  Let’s live up to the ideals of representing ourselves and spend some tax money on rebuilding the country we live in!  Let’s have a little more faith in what we as Americans, working together can accomplish.  We owe it to ourselves and to future generations to remember that the future will not wait for us to act, it will only overcome us.

R L Laffoon