LETTERS: GOVERNMENT KEEPS FAILING

To the editor:

It's hard for me to believe that a body of men who are supposedly intelligent can fail at everything they do. Yet our elected officials have done just that. They have supposedly attacked every problem that faces our country and, as yet,have never solved a single one of them.

The obvious reasons are easily apparent, but the ulterior motives can only be guessed at. If a problem is to be solved, the cause of the problem must be removed. Then the problem will automatically disappear. Sweeping dirt under the rug doesn't clean a house. Candy-coating a problem with money doesn't eliminate the problem. It only hides it from view until the coating wears away.

One example is crime. Our esteemed officials claim to be fighting this problem with tooth and nail (but, in reality, mostly with money), but the problem is getting worse. Blaming guns won't do the trick. Neither will throwing money at the problem. A gun never did shoot anyone. Only people do. The way to reduce crime is to remove the criminals, either by taking them off the streets or giving them the death sentence when appropriate. Our court system is charged with this responsibility but fails miserably.

Another example is our national debt, which they claim to be trying to reduce. But their actions belie their words. There is no reason whatsoever for the richest country on Earth to be one cent in debt. If we were to rid ourselves of the Federal Reserve, our debt would disappear.

I suppose everyone has heard of the war on drugs and the great war on poverty. We are losing these so-called wars dismally. The reason we are losing the war on drugs is because they only concentrate on the little dealers and not the big masterminds. It may be that it would be embarrassing for them to go after the big ones.

In the case of poverty, there is only a limited amount of money in the country. This doesn't include plastic and paper debt, because that isn't money. But it is always included in all government figures thrown around to make the people think they are well off and don't have anything to worry about. The rich aren't satisfied with 90 to 95 percent of the wealth. They want it all. That should explain why poverty is growing.

Now we come to another great war, the war on inflation. True inflation is caused by a shortage of goods. Anyone can see this isn't the cause of our inflation. Therefore, it means that our present inflation is artificially induced. By whom? Common sense will tell us that it is caused by those who pull all the strings, our elected officials. Our artificial inflation is caused by outrageously high taxes, unnecessary regulations especially on business and worthless money which is acutally worth only the paper it is printed on. When we have a year in which the inflation rate is only 2 percent by their account, they claim this is a victory in keeping the inflation rate down. Any inflation at all is a loss for the people, especially the poor. Also, their practice of calculating this year's inflation rate in relation to last year's is a gross deception. If instead it was calculated on prices that existed years ago when they first conceived of the idea, you would see that the actual rate would be more like 25 percent. This is one problem that probably causes as much poverty as anything, but of course it is never mentioned in political campaign speeches and very seldom in news items unless it is watered down and made to look like it is an unimportant detail.

Another problem is foreign policy. Space and time do not permit me to put on paper all the harm they have done to this country in this area. Even after spending billions of our dollars to try to buy our friends, we have more enemies than ever. People in foreign countries do not like someone meddling in their internal affairs any more than we like the United Nations trying to tax our people and take our guns away. Both of these actions have an ulterior motive that anyone should be able to understand.

Our officials like to refer to the leaders of some other countries as war lords. Who has been in more wars than anyone else since World War II? I think the term warlord could be used to describe some here in our own country more aptly.

This is only a fraction of the failures, and, try as I may, I cannot come up with a real success unless I count throwing money away. They are truly experts at that.

RAY UMBDENSTOCK

Cape Girardeau