DEAR EDITOR:
Stockton, Calif., went bankrupt. Why? Greece is out of money and owes more than she can pay. Is this bankruptcy? How about France, Spain, Italy? What about us, the U.S.?
We owe some other countries, China and a few others, more than $15 trillion. But we can print more of the greenbacks. Then what? I believe if we print more money without anything firm backing it up, this is called inflation. What is inflation? Most people know inflation is when a buck doesn't buy much anymore. No more bread for 10 cents a loaf or even $1 a loaf. A new car not available for $2,500 but at $25,000 plus.
Many of my generation remember when a house cost $14,000 or even less and a new car cost $1,200. Those were the days, but they did end.
In the early 1990s some people thought that a low-percentage variable rate mortgage was the way to go. House payments were still a struggle but most people made them on time. All of a sudden the future was now. The variable rate was just that, variable, and not a variation down, but up. Payments for the month were skipped until the homes were foreclosed upon and the housing bubble of the 1990s burst along with the "dot coms" of the stock market boom of the same 1990s. The big Clinton years weren't so big, gone and soon forgotten, except for the homeless that lost their wonderful homes and the people that bet on the dot com stocks and went broke.
Yes, those were the days. And here we are again. Except that inflation has not been halted. Local, state and the federal governments owe more than they take in. Schools are in trouble, as usual. Except there aren't as many homeowners to send the money to the school districts as there once were. What should be done? The working generation is not so much working as we did in the glorious past. So tax the heck out of those that were frugal enough to hang on to their coins for the future.
The public sector has more employees and retired folks than the private sector. Where does the public sector get its money? Not from themselves, except for the 10 to 15 cents on the dollar that they pay in their own taxes. So, where does the 85 to 90 cents on the dollar to pay the public wages come from? Yep, you guessed it, from the private sector. And with employment so bad, who does in fact pay? Think about it.
We need privately owned companies to once again produce our own products, put our own people back to work, get us back on the privately owned business payrolls, so the taxes are from the payrolls of businesses owned by stockholders and not the governments.
This is the simple answer but requires a lot of hard sweat and tears to accomplish.
-- Patrick Liste, Girard