To the editor:

Common sense tells me that if I am in debt and want to maintain the quality of life that I am used to, I certainly wouldn’t go ask my employer to start paying me less money. It seems to me that is what our government is doing every time they want to cut taxes.

I used to work as a mechanic at a local gypsum factory that was a training facility for engineers right out of college. I remember times when they would come up with plans to make the plant more efficient, and although things really looked good on paper, we had already tried these plans, and they wouldn’t work. Still, we had to go through hours and hours of work, and I have no idea how much money to prove that what looked good on paper still wasn’t going to work.

It seems that our government works the same way. In 1981, Ronald Reagan created the largest tax cut in U.S. history that reduced revenues by $19 trillion over a decade by today’s terms. They did raise some taxes, but revenues were still down over $10 trillion. This is about the time that our national debt started to pile up. George W. Bush’s tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 promised to improve economic growth and pay for themselves, but instead ballooned deficits and debt contributed to a rise in income inequality.

In Donald Trump’s first term, his tax cuts for the rich and big corporations were supposed to trickle down and increase wages for the middle class, but all that happened was corporations buying their stock back and the national debt increasing by 33 percent. Now in Donald Trump’s second term, he promised to cut waste and spending and created the Department Of Government Efficiency, which promised to save the country $2 trillion, then $1 trillion, then $500 billion. In reality it only saved an alleged $165 billion while disrupting our country’s workforce and benefits for people in need.

In reality, it is figured that by the time all the expenses for firing people and then figuring out that they needed them and having to hire them back, the savings were almost nothing, and that is not including all the lawsuits being filed for illegally terminating employees. The irony of all these people being fired is that government employee wages, benefits, and retirements make up less than 5 percent of the federal budget. It is reported that there are over a trillion dollars in back taxes owed to the IRS, so common sense would say hire more people to find and collect these taxes, but the Trump administration has fired thousands of IRS employees including auditors that would find people not paying their taxes.

Common sense tells me that if the government can grab a person off the street and throw a bag over their head and ship them off to another country, no one is safe.

Doug Brand

Fort Dodge