Dear Editor,

It is hard to believe that a reader missed the point of my letter for Sept. 20. I was not reiterating someone else’s opinion or saying that the unfortunate should not be helped, but stating the fact that our politicians are spending money that we do not have. As a country, we passed broke a long time ago. The current Washington crowd is adding about 1.3 trillion dollars each year to the national debt without passing a budget in the last four years. That is about three times what previous administrations added to our debt.

As a result, my question was who will write government checks when we are bankrupt. That is a simple question with a simple answer. The answer is no one because there is no more money to spend on anything. Our credit rating has been downgraded twice for the first time in history. The wealthy among us were not the reason for the downgrade, but our government’s uncontrolled and reckless spending caused the downgrades.

Hard work, individual responsibility, self-reliance and the freedom to succeed or fail built our country. No one was or is guaranteed success, but we did and still do have the freedom to try to better ourselves and not rely on someone else to take care of us. We all have an equal opportunity to make our lives a success. How we go about that is where the differences arise, but most of us don’t give up when we fail. We just pick up the pieces and try again. No one dictates how we should live or work. That decision belongs to each individual. Some will make good choices and some will not, but we do have the freedom to make our own choices, as long as our government stays out of the way and stops burdening us with more and more regulations.

Unfortunately, run away governmental spending is limiting our choices and costing us hard earned money in higher prices for gas, food and the threat of losing our jobs due to an economy that seems to be the worst since the Great Depression. Gas prices are high because Washington stopped drilling in the gulf and refuses to allow off shore government owned land drilling. Food prices are high because we are putting our food supply (corn used for livestock feed and human food) in our gas tanks. Prices for everything are rising because the government is printing money like there is no tomorrow. This reduces the value of each dollar we all worked so hard to earn.

Yes, I did urge everyone to think long and hard about how to vote. If you want financial reason to govern our spending, vote for change. If you want the status quo and more rampant spending, plunging us deeper into debt and closer to bankruptcy every day, vote for the administration that has had that track record for the past four years. If things continue as they are, we will all feel the pain of still higher prices and an economy that will eventually collapse.

Jack Parker

Patrick