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Highlands Today

Republican Hope

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Eric Veltri

Published: February 25, 2009

In yesterday's paper a writer wrote that he hopes that President Obama fails because, "Thinking that we can stimulate the economy by bigger government and more government programs is absurd and never worked." This is a rather startling, and I believe, unsubstantiated statement.

Sebring has a government that provides jobs to many people. Among the vital tasks they are entrusted with is supplying the citizens with safe drinking water and taking care of the sewage system. Highlands County provides jobs to hundreds of people running the public school system and maintaining our roads, just to name a few important functions.

The state provides thousands of vital jobs to individuals. The FHP provides security and maintains domestic order. The state's parks program keeps Highlands Hammock the wonderful resource that it is and also provides a living for many of our local residents.

Many of us have sons and daughters working for the federal government: ensuring that the mail is delivered in a timely fashion, keeping us safe domestically and against foreign enemies, and ensuring that it's safe to fly from one city to another. These are but a few of the vital functions that government provides for us and I am sure that all you readers can think of many others I haven't mentioned.

As far as providing additional government spending to stimulate the economy, I believe as do most citizens and almost all economists, that this is necessary at this time to get us out of a downward economic spiral. F.D.R. did it to begin to get us out of the Great Depression. Our nation did it to get Europe out of a recession with the Marshall plan following WWII. Eisenhower did it with the interstate highway system to get us out of the recession following World War II.

One of the areas that Bush failed in was to deregulate and downsize a lot of government functions such as the FDA, which resulted in a lot of unsafe food and consumer goods coming into the country with deadly result to some of our unsuspecting citizens. Additionally he failed to take action to regulate the housing and lending industries, the collapse of which has caused the tremendous economic problems we face today.

The sad truth appears to be that the Republican leadership, despite efforts by Obama and the congressional leadership to include some of their ideas in the stimulus package, seems to be determined to act in a way counter to what is in the best interests of the citizens of our country.

Eric Veltri
Sebring

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