Your Opinion: Heaping on more debt for our kids

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Dear Editor:

Through the end of August the feds extracted $2,883 billion from us (over $122,000 every second of every day for nine months), another record high, an 8 percent increase over the record levels of 2014. The Treasury Department estimates that in 2016 the feds will extract $309 billion more than in 2015.

Couple the dreaded sequestration spending cuts, the substantial reduction in the unemployment rate (not as many people needing handouts) and the reduced military spending (we aren't fighting wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan) with that dramatic rise in revenues and one would think the feds would be awash in money. Instead, in only the last two years of the Bush presidency did a previous president run an annual deficit as high as Obama will this year.

Who is getting all this money? In inflation adjusted dollars, when Kennedy was president the feds spent less than $5,000 per citizen, when Clinton was president spending had increased to $8,600 per citizen, under Obama it is now over $11,000 per citizen. It will increase to over $12,000 per citizen next year. Does anyone seriously think we are getting twice the value from the feds that we did in the early "60s?

Since the War on Poverty started 50 years ago government has redistributed $17-20 trillion (almost the same amount as our national debt). The failed "War on Poverty" has cost every US household over $150,000. What did we get for our money? We now have more people in poverty than when the "War" started. Only government could get away with such fiscal irresponsibility.

Sadly many of us choose to ignore the fact that we consumers pay all the taxes, business doesn't pay taxes. When you buy an item the cost of the materials to make that item, the cost of the labor to make the item, the cost of utility bills paid to keep the lights on, and the cost of taxes paid by the company making the item, are included in the price. Far to many of us are silly enough to believe businesses reduce dividends to pay taxes. Business taxes are just a tool the government uses to hide how much we really pay in taxes. How much more irresponsible spending increases, heaping more debt on our children, are we going to allow?