Bush’s Budget, Tax Cut

* Re “Fiscal Responsibility, Adieu,” editorial, April 11: The implication of your editorial is truly scary. Using the logic displayed in the editorial, we should never attempt to rein in government spending because it is a lost cause. We will just have to live with the inevitable pork that weighs down budget after budget solely for the benefit of incumbents and a few selected constituents.

Discretionary spending should just continue to increase at two to three times the rate of inflation in order to fund new priorities. Will there ever be a day when this defeatist attitude is reversed? Will tax cuts ever be appropriate?

JAMES STIRLING

Escondido

* Robert Scheer speaks eloquently with a humanitarian heart in his April 10 commentary, “Bush Could Really Use a Fireside Chat With FDR.” Scheer would like the government to help lift disadvantaged families and children from poverty. Bush wants to cut taxes for the rich and cut expenditures for the poor to pay for it. His “compassionate conservatism” is merely a code word, a propaganda lie--say one thing and do another.

If “say one thing and do another” sounds familiar, it’s the label the Bush team tried to stick on Al Gore during last year’s campaign. But where is the “compassion” in cutting programs for the least of us to give money to the richest of us?

GARTH BISHOP

Los Angeles

* Why don’t we quit arguing about the $1.6-trillion tax cut and just give it away; $266 to every man, woman and child on the planet: a fortune beyond their wildest dreams for many of the world’s families. Mind-boggling, huh?

ZENA THORPE

Chatsworth