Changing Role of Government to Honesty

By Bob Tkacz

The U.S. election ended weeks ago but Jessica Hale continues to spread the fear and divisiveness (``Changing Role of Government," Nov. 17 Thoughts of the Times) that American voters, including myself, rejected with great enthusiasm through the election of President-elect Barak Obama. I hope the Korean people will not be fooled by her falsehoods.

Ms. Hale's essay is virtually word for word the litany of lies voiced by Sen. John McCain and his running mate and my own governor in Alaska, Sarah Palin. It is also part of the particular and dangerous ideology of the educational institution she attends.

Despite President-elect Obama's continued rejection of the idea that he will tax small businesses, the writer repeats this lie, among many others. With the same ugly inference, she writes that Obama plans to punish ``those who worked hard enough" to earn more than $120,000, with his intended tax cut for those earning less.

Does the writer suggest those who work with their hands and backs are lazy because their bosses pay them as little as possible? I wonder if she's ever earned a penny through physical labor. And if she has and was disappointed by the size of her paycheck, did she blame herself for not working harder?

The happily but none-too-soon outgoing President Bush and his Republican Party, which controlled the U.S. Congress for most of the past eight years, did nothing but pander to wealth and fight all efforts by Democrats to help the working-class majority that sent Obama to the White House.

They put a clamp on minimum wage increases, raised interest rates on student loans and sparked the world financial crisis that Koreans and other hard-working people are suffering due to their the greedy deregulation of the banking and finance industries.

Hale complains that President-elect Obama will need to raise taxes to pay for the $1.3 trillion in new programs he proposes. Even if that simple statement was completely accurate, I wonder if she prefers the profligacy of the past eight years when President Bush drove the U.S. deeper and deeper into debt by launching the necessary invasion of Afghanistan and a stupid war in Iraq without proposing a means to pay for them.

Aside from the billions of won wasted by Bush's incompetent foreign adventures (not to mention the lost lives), the money saved by ending the Iraq invasion will save billions that will help pay for his new programs. Perhaps the writer will include economics in her future studies.

Taxes are an unpleasant necessity of modern society and should be kept as low as possible. Bush, McCain, Palin and Hale continually try to brainwash us all into viewing them as evil and promote the same bankrupt ``trickle-down" theory that let kings and queens live in luxury while the serfs provided their every comfort. She apparently wishes to return to those days.

I'm sorry to hear the writer is completing her graduate studies in government. If the views she expressed were the result of her educational career, perhaps a few more years would help her understand the enlightened and progressive policies that President-elect Obama and the world need.

Her identification noted that she is a student at Regent University, which proclaims itself to be ``America's preeminent Christian University." Regent University has a documented record of attempting to impose the values of fundamentalist Christian thought on the United States despite the clear prohibition against a state sponsored religion in the U.S. Constitution.

Regent University was exposed as a close participant in disgraced U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez's attempts to infiltrate the U.S. Department of Justice with a fundamentalist Christian ideology.

In view of this record, your readers may wish to view her suggestions with skepticism.

The writer is a career journalist based in Juneau, Alas. He has reported on Gov. Sarah Palin since her election in 2006 and Alaskan government since 1990. He is also Asia correspondent for the Fishermen's News (Seattle, Wash.) and has reported on the North Pacific Seafood industry since 1997. He can be reached at junobob@att.net