Politicians, not old folks, responsible for economic woes
Warren Coats' Oct. 18 Community Voices article, "Younger people shouldn't have to support elders," started out about visiting his ailing mother and then went into a rant over greedy old people ripping off poor young people.
I was mesmerized by his words. Was he calling his parents greedy? Did they steal from him? Who were these so-called poor? Was he referring to those obese welfare recipients with color TVs, air conditioning and two cars?
He followed up with a statement that America spends more on medical care than European countries. Did he mean countries like England, where women with breast cancer wait longer for treatment than American women? Maybe he meant France, where the government said it was going broke paying for its health care program.
Did Coats appoint himself the arbiter of how Americans can spend their money? The last time I heard, America was about a dream where we worked hard for our money and we spent it however we wanted. Did he think that what we earn is not ours? Is it his job to decide how much we can keep and how much we should turn over to his wise judgement?
He followed up with the right of government to regulate what kind of care an insurance company may provide and how much it can charge. When did we abolish the free market? When I was a boy, if someone had an item or service to sell they asked a price and if someone wanted it, they made an offer. If they agreed, then the exchange set the amount and the price. That system served America so well that it came to be the richest and most powerful country in the world. Now we have let Robber Barons and socialist politicians collude in perverting the market place so that we are in downward spiral of repetitive financial calamities.
Coats claimed that the need for socialized medicine is justified by the "Aging of America."
Where did all those old people come from? When I was a boy, the population of our country was 150 million and we had zero population growth -- so where did the other 180 million come from? Was it legal immigration or illegal immigration?
Coats said that there were not enough young workers to support all the old people on Social Security. Is it because greedy politicians stole from Social Security to fund their pork barrel projects? Millions of people paid billions for decades into that system. A study awhile back determined that if the money had been put into safe "passbook" type accounts, everyone on Social Security could receive $40,000 a year in benefits and still not touch their principle. But no -- we let those wise politicians in Washington, D.C., take our nest eggs and bail out GM, AIG, Chrysler and Goldman Sachs. That worked so well that Coats wants the same people to take over the management of our medical care.
Back in 1960 our economy was in the throes of a deep recession. A young John Kennedy had a radical idea -- lower the tax rate and turn loose the engine of free enterprise. Much to everyone's surprise, it worked! Our economy came back vigorously. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan had the same idea. His tax reductions took the country from a "general malaise" and ration lines at the gas stations to one of the nation's longest economic recoveries.
Here is an idea: Let's quit putting czars in charge of our money and our lives. Let's be Americans again and control our own lives. We could demand that politicians put back all the money they stole from Social Security. Let them fix Medicare, the U.S. Post Office and the FDIC before they embark on any new mega-spending programs. Let's bar any new Ponzi-scheme spending programs that cost trillions and bankrupt our whole economy. We could give families tax credits for health savings accounts. Insurance buyer co-ops and primary care clinics could bring down health care costs. Freeing insurance providers to sell across state lines would explode the level of competition. Stores like Wal-Mart sell low cost prescription drugs. They could also open up low cost in-store primary care clinics.
More importantly we could stop pointing the bony finger of blame on old people for our economic problems. Look in the mirror. We let pork barrel crazed politicians, and power hungry socialists, run away with our economy. Now we have to roll up our sleeves and take our economy and our country back.
Ralph Robles of Bakersfield has worked as an air quality instrument technician for 23 years. Born in 1944 to a family of farm laborers, he served in the U.S. Air Force for 20 years, and now works with the California Air Resources Board.
