I take exception to Rick Larsen’s Sunday guest commentary, “Separate debt ceiling vote from deficit reduction talks.“
While I believe it is important that we do whatever we can to avoid a default on Americ
a’s debt, I feel even stronger that we cannot let our political leaders off the hook. Again. This is what Rep. Larsen is calling for. He says that the job is too big and there is not enough time to deal with this issue before the artificial Aug. 2 date. We already hit the spending limit a couple of months ago. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner did some accounting tricks to buy some more time because our politicians couldn’t produce. Now they are saying that it is too hard to make the changes we need to make. If the job is too big for the people we have in place, we have the wrong people working on it.
I have heard lots of talk about cutting the budgets of different programs. What I want to know is why they are not talking about the outright elimination of some programs. The federal government has thousands of programs. You mean to say that you cannot pick 100 or 200 of them that are a waste of money and can be eliminated completely today? I’ll bet I, and most people reading this, could.
The spending of our politicians in both parties have put us in this debt hole. Now we are surprised that these same people say there is not enough time to fix the mess they made?
Note to our politicians, including Mr. Larsen: Step One, quit digging. Cut some programs, cut some spending and don’t dig the hole get any deeper starting right now. Once you do that, then ask for more time. If you can’t do that, then you and the others should let someone else, anyone else, get the job done.
Howard Bono
Arlington
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