Jerry Payne's letter that appeared on June 17 bore little resemblance to the "truths" he claimed. Obama broke the law in the auto bailout by putting labor unions ahead of other creditors who had claims before the bankruptcy court.
The Wall Street bankers did not cause the financial crisis. Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, among other liberals in Congress, insisted those bankers make loans to people who could not afford them. They, in turn, operated totally within the law to package these loans for very liberal-controlled Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac organizations who marketed the securities to investors without much consideration to truth in lending all the while knowing that the loans would largely default.
Insurance companies operate from time-tested probability charts (actuarial tables) which determine their risk. They have a legal obligation to protect the stockholders by running the business profitably. They cannot provide unlimited and unrestricted coverages to everyone without charging such a high premium that we could not afford to pay. The more the government requires coverages that not everyone needs, the more insurance will cost. Covering 23 million children might be admirable, but who pays for that? What right does Obama have to tell me what to do with what I worked for and earned? That was a president who was looking to control a whole lot more than health insurance in the future. Look what he has done since then. He has used executive orders more than 900 times since he was elected and nearly every one of them was intended to increase the power of the president without permission from Congress. The branches are, after all, co-equal under the Constitution.
Eight years of Bush added $3 trillion in debt - terrible as it is, three and a half years of Obama has given us $7 trillion in debt and climbing daily.
And lastly, corporate America is not the boogieman. Corporate America is what generates income for all the pension plans that union-lovers cherish. Corporate America is near, if not over, 50 percent of the general public who own stocks, bonds, or mutual funds invested in those corporations. Corporations are people. They are obligated to operate both legally and profitably. They are not intrinsically evil. That and the rest of what Payne wrote is the myth of liberal/progressive nonsense.
Tom Stark
Parkersburg
