Letter to the Editor: Agreement on working hard to prevent fulfillment of the prophecy

To the Editor:

I found it interesting and somewhat ironic that in his July 17 letter to the editor, Lowell Engle described proposals by several Democratic presidential candidates for single-payer health care (Medicare) and reducing student debt as “handouts.”  If he had paid attention, he would have learned that the costs of these programs are paid for.

What is not paid for is the huge tax break given to relatively few wealthy people and corporations in the 2018 Tax Bill, creating historic budget deficits and adding over a trillion dollars to our debt. I call that a handout.  What happened to the party of fiscal responsibility?

Mr. Engle’s attempt to portray the Democratic Party as not really democratic, but pushing towards “socialism and communism,” is simply a scare tactic to distract us from the fact that the Republican Party has been sabotaged and discredited by those who are driven by profit and power. 

Every executive order and piece of GOP legislation is destructive, aimed at dismantling something else, never creating anything new, never in the service of improving the care of the nation.

And, by the way, in 2009, the Democratic-controlled Congress voted to freeze members’ pay and that has continued for 10 years. So, although there is a current proposal in the House to increase Congress’s pay by $4500, it is a bi-partisan proposal and there are also bi-partisan proposals to continue the pay freeze. Facts matter.

Mr. Engle may be right about one thing -  in his letter, he cites a “prophecy” arguably attributed to a Scottish historian, Alexander Tytler (referred to as Tyler by Mr. Engle): “…a democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse over loose fiscal policy…”

I would suggest that Republican politicians are trying to beat the voters to this, and have made sure they and their donors can raid the public treasury for themselves.  So, we agree - work hard to prevent the fulfillment of the prophecy!

Katie Dodge Hanson
Lansing