Letter: The woes of extended tax cuts - and greed

Talk about it

The column “Cheney to GOP: Spend Away” on July 14 was a reminder of how our nation got into this debt mess. Columnist Dana Milbank did a great job of showing us the many Bush and Cheney mistakes, and for Cheney to give advice to Rep. John Boehner and Sen. Mitch McConnell is a big mistake and an insult to common sense.

Bush and Cheney spent money like drunken sailors and said deficits didn’t matter — but they did. Tax cuts and debt ceilings didn’t matter — but they did. If tax cuts created jobs, where are they? If President Obama had never extended the Bush tax cuts and used that tax money to pay off the debt, jobs would return as confidence returned to America.

Debt problems of the U.S., Greece, Spain and Italy give Wall Street the hiccups. Every time there’s a fear of default, we lose jobs. Obama’s only choice now is to let all Bush tax cuts run out and not sign an extension. He can’t deal with blockheads, and scheduled cost-cutting will cost lots of jobs.

On the Affordable Health Care Act, we need to hand out the Golden Fleece Award to GOP Rep. Billy Tauzin of Louisiana, who extended a 15-minute vote on the Medicare Part D Modernization Act so that the industry-authored bill that prohibited the federal government from negotiating drug prices could pass quietly in the night. Then, Tauzin collected his $2 million from his job as CEO of drug-lobbying PhRMA (Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America).

Later, in 2010, Tauzin killed the hope of a single-payer affordable health care bill, meeting with President Obama behind closed doors. For this, Billy Tauzin earned $11.6 million in the first half of 2010 alone. Tauzin left PhRMA in 2010 and has completed the cycle of greed as a board member of the Louisiana Healthcare Group, which specializes in selling mandatory broccoli. We could have a good health care bill!

Tags: opinion, letters, politics, healthcare