Publication Date: 04/21/09
Oh, Darsh, your freshman status doesn’t even condone your sophomoric letter Wednesday about the tea parties. While you do have a point that our representative government was elected by the people and it is our collective fault that they are in office, many of the representatives elected to public office in Washington have betrayed the principles upon which they campaigned.
The president rightfully lauded fiscal responsibility while lambasting the reckless spending of the past administration during his campaign, but is hypocritically endorsing a budget that will burden future generations with a devalued currency and beleaguered entitlement programs. Darsh, you are a freshman engineer, so I’ll keep the numbers simple. The Congressional Budget Office projects that President Obama’s budget will raise the national debt to 82.4 percent of the United States’ GDP. That will put our debt at a level not seen since the early 1950s right after World War II. These tea parties are protesting the egregious spending that is going on in Washington that all educated people know didn’t start with President Obama. A lot of people who voted for him just “hoped” that he would “change” the wasteful policies of old. It appears that they were wrong.
Random final thoughts, Darsh (bad grammar approaching): Please, oh please don’t use that great non-sequitur associating the Clinton-era tax levels with the tech bubble of the 1990s; the spontaneous, unregulated influx of job creation had nothing to do with upper-class tax rates; also read up on your history as the word “Democrat” was created as a political insult during Revolutionary times as someone who Mount Holyoke historian Joseph Ellis described as one who “panders to the crude and mindless whims of the masses”; I only bring that up because it looks like the original definition still holds great relevance.
Trenton Morton
Senior, School of Nuclear Engineering