Dear Editor:
President Franklin Roosevelt asked for emergency powers and enacted a great many changes by setting up welfare and public works programs while expanding the federal government’s regulation of business. Excess profits tax and progressive income taxes provided a redistribution of earnings and the establishment of the social security system went to protecting all of the people. Naturally, conservative elements labeled these moves as extreme radicalism.
A few decades later, when President Lyndon Johnson urged and won passage of health care in the form of Medicare and Medicaid and civil rights laws, he was denounced as a man leading the country into dangerous socialism.
The new deal and the great society, by prevailing over reactionary forces, dedicated to power and wealth in the hands of a few privileged individuals, were able to set the groundwork for much progress in the years to come. The Republican Party has rationalized from time to time that money at the top will trickle down to the less fortunate but some malfunction seems to occur during the process.
President Barack Obama is being verbally abused in the most severe way by right wing exponents for suggesting programs and bills which do not begin to go as far as the new deal and great society, both proven successes, and yet it has reached the stage where he had not even been granted a short political honeymoon period, some of his foes beginning their assaults virtually from day one of his presidency. Previous presidents, democrat or republican, were granted that brief rest period.
Howard Lawson