THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, July 23, 1994 TAG: 9407220016
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A10 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Letter
LENGTH: Short : 38 lines
Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan says: ``We are already paying for our failure to come to grips with our long-term budget problem. Demographic trends imply an inexorable upward path for government expenditures as the next century unfolds. The longer we wait, the more Draconian the remedies will have to be'' (news, July 16).
Unless our president and Congress aggressively pursue the reduction of the federal government and the welfare system, this once great nation will be dead in the water in less than 10 years.
Anything else the government pursues is just tilting windmills.
Is there a need for a Department of Education or Energy? We have 10 times as many bureaucrats in the Department of Agriculture as we had 30 years ago and one-half as many farmers. And our president wants to foist yet another unfund-able government program on us with his health-care package.
We are a nation of sheep being led to the slaughter. Our representatives seek our votes, and our president can't say no to anyone. He tells each group whatever they want to hear. The great British statesman Edmund Burke stated it clearly: ``Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.''
Khruschev told Nixon in 1961 that Russia was not the danger to our country's survival that we were to ourselves; that we would collapse from within. How prophetic his words are today.
Wake up, America. We are in the 11th hour.
BOB BRINER
Virginia Beach, July 19, 1994 by CNB