Dear Editor:
Can you take someone seriously when they are not serious? In a recent column, Rep. Luetkemeyer proposes to save my barbecue grill from the EPA. Actually he is upset over the EPA regulating our environment. But must he play us for fools? His true goal is to defame the EPA because his big donors are unhappy with possible proposed regulations on coal-fired utilities.
Conservatives have been clowning about the EPA and barbecue grills since at least 2008. Recently the EPA funded a small study to see what it would take to have a better product design on a barbecue grill when the grease drips into a pan and is burnt off. Like secondary smoke from cigarettes, this burn off is not healthy to you and me. Is Rep. Luetkemeyer really about you or me? Or is he just against better products being sold to his constituents?
Every time Rep. Luetkemeyer is elected, he pockets $348,000 for his two-year term. Each year he proposes 10 or less bills of which almost none are passed. He does cosponsor up to 100 bills a year. Last week a privileged constituent asked our representative what he was doing to simplify the 70,000 pages of the IRS code. His answer was he was co-sponsoring a bill to eliminate the IRS. In February Forbes Magazine, the publication for the rich, joked that this bill had less than 1 percent chance of passage. So, the real answer was that Rep. Luetkemeyer was doing nothing.
Conservative friends say this is just politics. Sure, but this kind of futility is why Luetkemeyer and his colleagues have a public favor ability rating in single digits. Our politicians get a nice salary and a public forum, but they mostly do whatever their rich donors want.
Two weeks ago Rep. Luetkemeyer was going to save the family farm from inheritance taxes. This has been a big Farm Bureau issue for years. In 2001 David Cay Johnson, the tax expert, asked the Farm Bureau to produce one American for him to interview that had lost their farm from inheritance taxes. They could not produce a single name. Some sources say only 20 farm families in the entire nation are affected by this tax. Rep. Luetkemeyer is ready to rescue these rich farmers.
If our politicians are not serious about real issues, do they deserve for us to be serious about them?
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