Dear Mr. President

By Noah
 
Dear Mr. President:
    
You have inspired me! But, perhaps not in the way you would have wanted. This morning, I received, in my email, your explanation for your proposed budget via your whitehouse.gov website. I composed a short, respectful note in response since your site claimed to welcome such things. I hit submit and instantly got a notice that you were unable to receive my message, that the site was being renovated, blah, blah, etc. Yeah, right. I guess it’s all an indication of the new austerity that you didn’t even bother with the old circular file trashcan. So, in response, I have decided to elaborate.
     
In both your speeches and in your emailed explanation, you talk about "shared sacrifice." To quote you directly:

"Getting our fiscal house in order requires shared sacrifice." 

You are often accused by media propagandists and their ignorant followers of wealth redistribution. They would have us believe that the distribution is downward when, in fact, you are continuing the distribution of wealth upward that was accelerated by your idol President Ronald Reagan and perfected by so-called President George W. Bush. As I write this, the wealthiest 1% in our country own a whopping 24% of the nation’s wealth and the same 1% “earns” more than the bottom 50%. Apparently, this isn’t enough to satisfy you or the criminals of Wall Street and our corporate boardrooms (or should I say, golf courses and yachts?). Yes, taxes are lower now than the Dubya years, and have been since you took over, but still, Warren Buffet pays more tax than his secretary. He pays an effective tax rate of 16% while his secretary pays the usual 35%. Even he is on record as saying it’s a ridiculous situation.
 
According to one of the very few trustworthy people in Washington, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), 18,000 businesses are allowed to list a single address for a single four story building in the Cayman Islands so they can avoid paying their fair share of taxes.Must be a very crowded building. Yet you folks in Washington continue to take pride in giving tax breaks to your rich cronies in the Top 2% and to corporations that use a wide variety of loopholes designed by the venal bribe-taking crooks in Congress and K Street Slime to avoid paying taxes at all to begin with. How much did Exxon pay on their $19 BILLION last year? Answer: ZERO. AND, they get a Congress approved Oil Subsidy culled from taxpayer dollars in addition! Taxpayers give lowlifes like Exxon their money so that poor abused Exxon won’t have to pay taxes themselves! Where do I get that deal, Mr. President? I could go on and on with a list of similar Corporate Welfare deals you all hand out but why bother? You and Boehner probably both play golf with the various CEOs and have some good laughs (at our expense, literally, no doubt) over some beers. Nah, probably Dom Perignon, eh?
    
You punish the victims but not the perps. To date, no one who deliberately caused the current economic chaos has gone to jail. At least Reagan put some of the S & L perps away for a while, even if it was only whose whitecollar tennis camp type of jails. You think we are stupid and not worthy of respect and fair treatment. History is full of the lessons of class warfare. I don't see why the middle and working classes have to pay not only their share but your share and your friend's shares too. Your vision of “shared sacrifice” is quite different than mine. Neither of us would be in the situations we are in if this country had a fair and sensible tax code. Dubya applied the coup de grace to that. At this point, you might want to look up Senator Ted Kennedy’s famous “What is the price” speech.



I have a few questions for you. The nation’s budget is a shambles. How do you expect to keep tax revenues pouring into our treasury when you allow the rich and the corporations not to pay taxes and how do you expect to get tax money from people who don’t have jobs because you allow and incentivize your cronies to ship their jobs out of our country? 43,000 factories closed during the Bush years. You can’t tax people who don’t have a job or an income, but you can try to squeeze blood from a stone and that is what you are attempting. Apparently, you even want to go after Social Security and other entitlements just as state governors want to loot state pension funds and bust unions to do it like the mob used to. How do you expect citizens to buy goods when you have taken all of their income, their savings, and then even gone after their pensions and the entitlements they paid into? Earth to Washington: A business without customers will not prevail! How many homeless people are required to be on the streets before you notice or should I say, care? A huge CONE OF DELUSION is covering the Washington Beltway and everything within its boundaries. There is no other way to explain the Washington disconnect unless there is nothing but meanness there. Will you be allowing tent cities on the Mall? Bathing in the reflecting pool?
    
I'm sure no one in the White House will bother to read this. It’s probably been deleted already. It wouldn’t surprise me if all email to Washington automatically went into a giant Spam folder. I was a Democrat. ENOUGH! MY DISGUST RUNNETH OVER. My vote may not matter so much when I vote for third party candidates in 2012, BUT it obviously already doesn't matter and besides, I will at least be voting in good conscience. Yeah, I know. The phrase 'good conscience' doesn't represent a concept that is well regarded in Washington. I suppose it's viewed as quaint or antiquated. 
 
You are all creating a class of people who have nothing to lose and no hope of gain. I wonder if all you suits can grasp the very unhealthy implications of that for all of us and our country. Your "invest in the future" sloganeering is not unlike the old "you'll get your reward in heaven." Both are merely slogans put forth by elite power entities, designed to buy time with false illusions of hope, delivered with fingers crossed behind the back. They amount to "Here, have some hope, so we can screw you now;" your version of the "Trickle Down" that never came, never will, and wasn’t meant to do anything but put smirks on the faces of government. I am reminded not only of one of our worst presidents, Ronald Reagan, but also one of the best, Franklin Roosevelt. When he died, a man was interviewed as FDR’s casket rode by in a funeral train. He was what you Washington types disdain as an “ordinary American,” rather than your favorite kind. He was asked why he was there and he famously said “I didn’t know President Roosevelt, but he knew me." Do you even care how you will be remembered? FDR created the safety net. Eisenhower built the Interstate Highway system. JFK put men on the moon. LBJ at least expanded voting rights to people who had been denied them. What will be your lasting, crowning achievement, the world’s largest tent city? Bigger morgues?