Middle-class Americans are not imbeciles 03-18-2011

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Letter to the editor by Joseph Paterek

After stereotypically describing average Americans as “SUV-riding, Starbucks-wafting imbeciles in debt up to their ears,” and characterizing the Tea Party movement as a kind of  “new old-time religion” engaged in mind control, Wendy E. Binnie complains in her column of March 11 about the apparent paradox of rising wealth alongside growing unemployment.

She explains this by tapping the unlimited mental resources of none other than Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank, a key figure in the ruination of the banking and housing industries in this country. Congressman Frank provides a litany of his own explanations: globalization, outsourcing of jobs to low-wage countries, weakening of the unions, and a tax system that favors the wealthy investor.

Companies have been outsourcing jobs since they discovered that the U.S. government had been taxing them at about twice the rate of foreign countries, and union contract proposals stubbornly reached for the sky in salary and benefit demands. The Washington Administration has been strengthening the unions with multi-billion-dollar payments of taxpayer money as reward for turning out the vote in 2008 for presidential candidate Obama and the Democrat Party. For the past two years the tax system has been steadily squeezing investors as the federal government made redistribution of wealth a primary domestic-policy goal. Small-business operators and entrepreneurs, who create and provide at least 70 percent of American jobs, are reluctant to hire and expand their businesses as they face an uncertain future of mounting national debt and deficits with the prospect of higher taxes and more regulation.

The rapid decline of the United States will end in mediocrity and exploitation by an oligarchy of elite socialists unless we, as a free people, regain control, shrink government, and restore our basic values and principles.

Joseph Paterek