Letters
Letters to the editor
Highlands Today
Published: January 6, 2012
We can't compromisePublished: January 6, 2012
If you were on a bus barreling toward a cliff at a hundred miles an hour, would you sit down with the driver and try to find common ground, perhaps agreeing that the bus should only go 50 miles an hour toward the cliff, or would you do everything within your power to stop the bus?
Our federal government is that bus, and by borrowing 40 cents for every dollar it spends, our country is headed toward disaster.
Tea party Congressmen were not elected to compromise and slow the bus down. They were elected to stop it and reverse course, and now they are being vilified for trying to keep their promise to shrink government and told to find "common ground."
Unfortunately, there are members of Congress, in particular Senate Democrats led by Harry Reid, who refuse to cut spending. The best they can do is budget a yearly increase in spending, then reduce that increase and call it a cut in spending when it is actually an increase.
When the Republicans tried to institute real cuts in exchange for raising the debt ceiling, the big spenders threatened essential programs rather than slash the bloated federal bureaucracy.
Compromise is not what we need. Between disaster and safety, there is no common ground. We need real, massive cuts. We need to live within our means.
Dale O'Leary
Avon Park
Pension funds
A recent press release disclosed that Gov. Scott and his legislative coterie have embarked on a plan to invade the state's pension fund to invest millions in high-tech start-ups and growth companies to serve as a source of venture capital for companies, which is consonant with the governor's philosophy of job creation through investment.
Never mind the fiduciary principle or the rules of prudent investment.
This same group, so concerned with the underfunding of state pensions and the supposed lack of contribution by public employees, now regard the fund as their own slush fund with which to play the market and forward their own political agenda, without regard for the safety of pensioners, letting a Philadelphia brokerage house manage their investment.
And isn't this the same bunch that was so critical of Obama for using TARP funds to save a moribund U.S. auto industry? Where was Florida's Attorney General and the chief financial officers in all of this?
What is needed now is an amendment to the Florida Constitution, providing a recall mechanism for the governor and legislators who feel their authority is without limits and can play fast and loose with what should be treated as trust funds.
Randy Ludacer
Lake Placid