Past mistakes must not be repeated

Dear Editor:
Those who are complaining that taxes are being raised on people within some levels of the six figure bracket maintain that we are drifting from the American way and swiftly becoming a socialistic country, they feel that a redistribution of the wealth undermines American values by injuring private initiative and thereby eliminates competition.
In rebuttal, it is apparent that we already have an unfair distribution of the wealth with the scales heavily in favor of the affluent with countless tax allowances enjoyed by the wealthy. Even in the area of charitable contributions, the rich benefit from income tax deductions resulting from those donations. The outcry from the rich is mostly that there are welfare abuses but this charge is negated by the huge majority of poor who are legally entitled to any assistance they receive, unlike the wealth that is supposed to trickle down from the corporations but seldom does. Ironically, what ever is received by the indigent could not equal the welfare of the rich in the form of the favorable treatment they have been receiving through the years.
If the American way and proper values represent what the United States economic system has become at this period in our history then it is time what we find a new way and a fresh system. When a man who has the ability to hit a baseball into the stands with consistency can make forty or fifty times more money than a nursing home worker who, in a day, must tend to the defecation and vomit of patients in his or her care or when a lower level employee has become unemployed because of the mismanagement of some bonus receiving executive then a change is urgently needed.
The present changes in our government must be achieved, for if we are to continue the measures of the past, we will merely repeat the collapses of the ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman world powerful civilizations who fell mostly because of inner decay.

Howard Lawson

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