Racial remarks were merely metaphors Re: “Fight for D.C. rights gets racial,” April 15
Examiner reporter Freeman Klopott totally misinterprets statements made about Congress’ control over the District as racial when they clearly are not. Mayor Gray’s references to slavery and Emancipation Day were used to illustrate how Congress lords it over D.C. and refuses to give us either legislative or budgetary autonomy.
The mayor, and everyone else fighting the outrageous riders Congress has imposed on the District, stated that 600,000 of some of the most diverse residents of any city in the nation are affected by these actions.
When D.C. Council member Michael Brown used the word “massuh,” he was referring to how black slaves would have to address plantation owners. But it was clear that he didn’t mean this is about race, but about how Congress treats the District.
Peter Rosenstein
Washington
Reducing corporate taxes will increase revenue
Re: “Budget pact hardly touches current-year deficit,” April 13
With the budget deal, President Obama signed his fate as a single-term president. Raising taxes and cutting spending is the plain vanilla decision-making we have come to expect from him. Nearly all economists would say that Obama’s solution will not make the jobs problem any better and will have a negative effect on the economy.
Many ills of the economy can be solved by lowering corporate tax rates and increasing personal income taxes. Corporate executives will hire more people who, in turn, will pay more income taxes at higher rates.
Taxpayers’ desire to avoid paying more taxes will result in the utilization of various tax credits and deductions and increased efficiencies to offset their losses.
Kevin Bruening
Columbia, Md.
Founders rejected basic tenets of global economy
Re: “Fed member raise specter of higher interest rates,” April 6
I was recently angered by a highly paid federal bureaucrat at the U.S. Import-Export Bank who saw a return to the gold standard and a revalued U.S. dollar as detrimental to an international economy.
He laughed when I told him that the founders knew that a sovereign political economy, protected by proper trade agreements with foreign nations, was the only sure means of securing the blessings of economic liberty for citizens of the United States, as the Preamble to the Constitution so succinctly states.
These wise men realized that the American dollar was strictly a national unit of exchange based upon a gold or silver standard, the value of which was under the exclusive dominion of the U.S. Congress, not an international unit of exchange governed by a private banking cartel that fluctuates in value according to foreign economies.
This bureaucrat was more concerned with the negative effect on other nations than the positive domestic effect a return to the gold standard would have on the lives of U.S. citizens. Since 1913, the global economy that is now determining Americans’ quality of life has slowly, incrementally, and very quietly replaced the thriving independent economy our Founding Fathers diligently strove to establish.
Norton R. Nowlin
Woodbridge
