Your Opinion: GOP policies going backward

Dear Editor:

Would you take personal money and loan it to some guy you met at the local diner? If you did, shouldn't you verify he had a job or some type of collateral to repay the loan? And if you did these foolish things, people would be correct to call this reckless behavior. What if you sold the loan to your church? If the loan defaults, it is not your problem.

This basically describes the criminal fraud that our money center banks engaged in and which has brought down our economy. Who has gone to jail? In fact, our public money has rescued these major banks from disaster. Their business goes on and prospers. They have avoided any serious new regulations over their predatory lending practices. They took public money at a zero interest rate. We still guarantee their worthless assets on their books at 100 cents on the dollar.

If you are not angry over this situation that is because so many sources want to white wash the facts. And yes, it is a complicated story. Yet, selling bad loans is not different than if the automotive industry sold Americans clearly defective cars. We would band together to demand our money back.

Remember the loan to the church part? Here is an example. John Kasich, now governor of Ohio, was an employee of Lehmann Brothers and Fox News. He used his position to influence the Ohio state pension fund to add mortgage backed securities from Lehmann. Ohio's pension fund lost all of that money. This criminal fraud scheme is exactly why so many states are in financial trouble.

Here we are. The richest two percent of Americans were threatened with Clinton era taxes on their marginal income, going from a 35 percent to 39 percent tax. This was called socialism. When average workers' salaries are cut 14 percent, this is called, doing their part.

At present our political class both nationally and locally are pretending to be fiscally responsible by cutting salaries, jobs and benefits from the working class. These cuts are so pathetically small in regards to the deficits, that they are virtually meaningless as fiscal actions. In fact, Moody's, Goldman Sachs and GAO have reported that current Republican budget cutting measures insure a significant loss to the nations GDP this year and for the future.

Thanks Republicans, we are going backwards. Of course, they will blame Obama for their actions.