Where are the jobs?
Dear Editor:
Congratulations to our new Republican House of Representatives! They have finally done what they set out to do when they took control of the House. They destroyed our economy.
In the past week we have seen massive drops in stock prices, a downgrade of US credit and economic numbers that signal a second recession is all but imminent. I congratulate the House for this because it was their chest thumping that earned us the credit downgrade, it was their votes against any type of job creating legislation that has driven these awful economic numbers and it was a combination of those actions (combined with European issues) that caused the massive drop on Thursday August 4th.
Locally, Lou Barletta ran on creating jobs. Where are they Lou? We have seen you slash an enormous amount of federal jobs (thereby raising the unemployment rate), yet you still have failed to create one job, much like while you were the mayor of Hazleton. On top of his job killing votes he also voted to dismantle Medicare. How is making our seniors go broke paying healthcare costs to FOR PROFIT insurance companies going to create one job?
It won't.
On a state level, Doyle Heffley has voted to destroy at least 20,000 jobs inside Pennsylvania since taking office. Where is the outrage? We need people to have jobs if we want our tax burdens to be lower. If less people have income that is taxable, then the rest of us will have to pick up the slack and we will be taxed more. This is easily seen in the increases in our school taxes. The state (Doyle Heffley) refused to adequately fund our schools, so we are all destined to see a property tax increase to make up the difference.
Mr Heffley says that schools waste money. Do they? Some do I'm sure. However, our children still need to be educated and it's not free. If Mr Heffley was that concerned about schools wasting money then he would actually introduce his own legislation in order to do away with the standardized tests that are cheating today's students out of their education.
The moral of the story is that it is time for our childish legislators to either grow up and do what's best for the average person in their district or GET OUT.
Angrily yours,
Harold James
Summit Hill
