Letters: Technocrats to the rescue?

Re “It’s the fiscal future,” Opinion, May 23

David M. Walker wants Obama and Romney to spell out their tax policies. However, our dysfunctional Congress controls taxes. Our imperial presidents start wars, but they can only hope for tax changes. Obama promised healthcare reform, but Congress produced a patchwork of half-measures without cost controls, leaving us at the mercy of the insurance companies.

Walker prescribes a precise 3-1 ratio of spending cuts and tax increases.

There is no magic technocratic solution. Economics is not experimental science, and it is distorted by ideology. Governments won’t survive without

give and take and perceived social justice.

The U.S. is too big for a single economic policy. We must permit regional policy differences; for example, maybe Texas and other red states want to subsidize oil companies and professional sports, while blue states want to subsidize education, healthcare and libraries.

Bob Snodgrass

Pasadena

Walker should explain why, in the richest nation in history, the burden of fiscal prudence must be borne by orphan children, disabled adults and retired workers by cutting their meager Social Security benefits.

A corporate aristocracy has suborned the government. Money and power trickle up from most Americans to those who already have both. Politicians prescribe a starvation diet for the hungry as the only cure for the nation’s fiscal ills. And no one tries to explain the incomprehensible failure of our government to preserve the fundamental human rights of its people, much less propose a solution that protects them.

Eleanor Egan

Costa Mesa

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