Editor:
I don’t subscribe to any ideology. I guess that leaves me free to look for the facts and form my own opinions about politics. The “Endless Wailing” (Mailbox, March 20) somehow omitted the facts about which party contributed the most to the deficit and which attempted to reduce the deficit. RAND Corp published a study a few years ago about how taxpayers contribute trillions dollars per year to the wealthy elite. Over the decades that would have paid for the entire $36 trillion deficit with another $20 trillion to boot. So, in a real sense we have been accepting a debt in order to make the wealthy wealthier. I understand why the wealthy can afford to donate billions in elections if they can reap trillions in return. So let’s not complain about the deficit since we citizens allow the politicians in Congress and the White House to support their real constituents.
Notes: Politifact: “Reagan took the deficit from $70 billion to $175 billion. Bush 41 took it to $300 billion. Clinton got it to zero. Bush 43 took it from zero to $1.2 trillion. Obama halved it to $600 billion. Trump’s got it back to a trillion.” Carter Price, a senior mathematician at RAND Corp., discusses a new report from RAND’s researchers on Sept. 18, 2020. The report found that $2.5 trillion is redistributed from the bottom 90 percent of Americans to the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans every year.
Dennis Whitcomb, Blue Lake
This article appears in Cal Poly Presents’ Season of Change.