State of the Union Address

Editor,

Fellow traveler Jim Hightower in usual fashion described the Presidents speech as what we really needed to hear and praised his political honesty. I found the only thing that was great about this political speech was its brevity, some 18 minutes.

The President must have had a White House basketball game about to begin or he was late for his golf excursion, perhaps in Hawaii. Otherwise the speech was a rendition of all the socialist aims that he had not yet been able to accomplish and planned to spend more money that the nation doesn’t have. He even attempted to suggest that his view of the country was similar to that of President Abraham Lincoln’s. Nothing could be farther from the truth. He appealed to the middle class, whose taxes he had just caused to be raised, and to the non-taxpayers to join him in spending more money on the nation’s infrastructure.

I recently read the first inaugural address of President Ronald Reagan, including his handwritten rendition which he had written on a plain yellow tablet. What a difference! You will recall that we had just suffered through the term of President Jimmy Carter and faced a huge national deficit and had hostages held in Iran. His speech was one of optimism and faith in the American people to be able to accomplish great things. He reaffirmed that government was the instrument of the citizens and that it needed to serve the people, not dominate them. He stated that we needed to return to the principles of government as the servant of and by the people as envisioned by our Founding Fathers and set down in our Constitution. He further stated that it was time to live within our means by returning reasonable levels of taxation. And all of this message was delivered without the aid of a teleprompter. What a contrast from what we heard recently.

It worked before and it can work again. Even so the prospects for the return to fiscal solvency will take many years with our current national debt at 1.2 million dollars for each taxpaying citizen. It took World War II to end the depression of the 1930s and it will take several decades to overcome our present indebtedness even without a world wide conflict.

Let us hope and pray that fiscal sanity will return soon.

Carl Cornelius,

Sidney