Dear Editor:
It's probably an accident, but the News Tribune recently printed a Jim Dyke cartoon that wasn't racist, misleading or an outright lie.
The March 11 cartoon was captioned "the elephant in the country" and depicted an elephant labeled "19.1 trillion debt." Since an elephant is the symbol of the Republican Party, and the debt is due almost entirely to Republican policies and follies, it's actually an accurate depiction.
The national debt doubled under Ronald Reagan and quadrupled under George W. Bush. The debt incurred under President Obama's administration was necessary to keep the country from plunging into a depression and even that has been reduced by almost two-thirds. Republican policy of cutting taxes for wealthy people and businesses has led to wonderful profits for people with the top 1 percent of incomes; they profited handsomely from the Great Recession.
Businesses pay lower taxes now than in the 1950s. Unfortunately, this self-serving policy has also increased the income gap between the fortunate few and the rest of the population and caused the degradation of infrastructure in the nation as a whole and in states with such foolish leadership. Kansas, for example, is drowning in debt after experimenting with a radical tax-cutting policy that was supposed to spur growth. It hasn't.
Gov. Bobby Jindal in Louisiana did the same thing and transformed a $1 million budget surplus into a $3 million deficit. Presto! Our own Missouri legislators have dutifully followed the similar dictates of their puppeteers, resulting in underfunded schools and colleges and a crisis in transportation funding.
Missouri ranks last or in the bottom 10 of so many quality indicators that it's hard to keep track of them. Our legislators, however, can think of little else than interfering with women's health care and planning for swankier offices for themselves (as they scheme to take over the Highway Department building).
This is what happens when citizens blindly vote for a political party as if they're choosing a Super Bowl team, instead of considering issues.