Our Economic Reality
Noam Neusner’s effort to make Mitt Romney a greater champion of tikkun olam than Barack Obama (“Making the Jewish Case for Mitt Romney,” September 7) and therefore more worthy of Jewish support reminds me of what Davy Crockett is supposed to have said about the rhetoric of a political opponent: “It don’t even make good nonsense.”
Neusner writes as though the incumbent inherited a robust free-enterprise system that his administration has willfully and perversely endangered by preferring statism, as though President Obama deliberately intended to enlarge the populace relying on food stamps so that citizens can become dependents of government largesse. Has Neusner forgotten so quickly how dangerously the economy was veering in late 2008 toward a repeat of the Great Depression, and how much Obama did to enable the nation to escape that fate? Neusner’s concern for indebtedness would be more convincing if he noted that Governor Romney has every intention, if elected, of reproducing the failed and reckless Republican policies that Democrats have been struggling to correct. The last president to produce balanced budgets and to give his successor an actual surplus was Bill Clinton, and he is, of course, supporting President Obama.
Even the Ryan budget plan, which Romney has praised as “marvelous,” would not bring federal income into alignment with federal spending for at least two more decades, because of the GOP desire to dramatically increase the bloated Pentagon budget and to reduce taxes even further upon the very wealthy. Neusner seems to lament that “half of Americans pay almost no income taxes.” Has his candidate for the presidency been among them? And how would we as voters know the answer to that question?
Stephen Whitfield
Lexington, Mass.
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