The Supremes
In its ruling on media ownership, the current makeup of the Supreme Court reveals again its bias, a la Citizen’s United, of promoting the power of wealth over lesser beings. Apparently unconsidered was the narrowing and loss of diverse opinion open to the public, then again, perhaps it was. Authoritarian aristocracies of wealth have long been the enemy of democratic governance.
Robert Porath/Boulder
A word or two from the Right
My wife and I recently moved to Colorado from two red states, North Dakota and Florida. We often joked with our friends we probably doubled the population of conservative Republicans in Boulder County. We like reading all the local publications including the Weekly, but we have become surprised how limited local publications are in diversity of thought. So in that spirit we are writing this letter to the editor so your readers may consider that there are key factors regarding the economy, climate change (aka the Green New Deal) and governance other than the single-minded mantras that they are reading.
First, we cannot serve ourselves, our environment, our poor (citizens or immigrants) or the world if we become bankrupt as a nation. A few simple facts: According to the Brookings Institution, the sum total of all privately held wealth in the United States is $98 trillion. The U.S. currently has (due to outrageously irresponsible policies and spending) a national debt of $28 trillion. The COVID-19 Cares Act Bill, passed during the Trump administration, was $2.2 trillion and the additional most recent COVID-19 Relief Bill passed by the Biden administration is $1.9 trillion. Biden’s new infrastructure bill is estimated at $2 trillion and the amount of the proposed Green New Deal Bill is estimated at between $10 trillion and $20 trillion depending on how restrained Congress is in applying all the wish lists of the lobbyists and activists. The American Action Forum estimated that the Green New Deal could ultimately cost between $51-$93 trillion over the next decade. Unfortunately, we must add to this the projected $210 trillion of liabilities to Social Security and Medicare programs that our government cannot fulfill if we continue to run deficits in these programs.
My wife is a doctor and I am a former high tech entrepreneur turned philanthropist. We both want to save the world but it is clear we cannot do so if we destroy our country before we can even hope to address these issues. The path we are going down right now leads to disaster. It is the same path that many failed socialist nations have followed including Argentina, Venezuela and Zimbabwe. These nations have seen their currencies devalued by hyperinflation by over 10 million percent, millions of its citizens flee their countries and its remaining citizens reduced to abject poverty. If we are to enact all the proposed policies that the liberals are now pushing through their majority in Congress we will have effectively spent more than the sum total of all the money held by our citizens. If we continue spending on these monstrously enormous and irresponsibly planned policies, our government printing presses will run until our currency is not worth the paper it is printed on. We will then reduce all of our citizens’ life savings to nothing and none of the great hopes and dreams of the idealists on the left will ever get realized.
Brett Kingstone/ via internet
