Young people are becoming complacent Re: “If Generation Y doesn’t wake up, the U.S. is in trouble,” Aug. 3
Stephanie Wang’s article about college students increasingly losing their rights struck a chord with me. As a student at Seton Hall University in South Orange, N.J., I identified with the bans she mentioned in her article. My campus, for example, bans the sale of chewing gum to improve the “general cleanliness and appearance of the campus.”
While seemingly trivial, students’ complacency for four years on campus creates young adults entering the real world who are comfortable with the status quo and stand idly by while big government strips away their civil liberties.
Cynthia Bell
Arlington
Balanced budgets are not impossible
Re: “Chasing votes by promising to do impossible things,” Aug. 3
Michael Barone argues that the Tea Party wanted the president to do “impossible” things like “default on the national debt.” In fact, the Tea Party did no such thing. Opposing fake budget deals that do not stop the current borrow-and-spend insanity is not the same as wanting the country to default.
As Sen. Rand Paul notes, the deal that “cuts” the deficit by $2.1 trillion is relative to a baseline budget that increases the deficit by $10 trillion over 10 years. Thus, the deficit will increase by over $7 trillion, assuming the “cuts” actually happen, which is dubious. Even worse, the deal never envisions a balanced budget. Yet Barone considers the Tea Party irresponsible for opposing this feckless deal, and scoffs at the Tea Party’s lack of experience! Personally, I prefer these “amateurs” to the “experienced” Washington politicians who got us into this mess and refuse to let us out.
If we continue on our current fiscal course, then default and economic catastrophe are inevitable. At that point, we will have to balance the budget, but only after we’ve accumulated trillions in new debt and the world finally refuses to lend us any more money. Why not accept some short-term pain and balance the budget now in order to avoid this much greater pain in the future? Far from being impossible, U.S. states balance their budgets, some foreign countries do so, and even the federal government balanced the budget as recently as 2000.
James Perry
Arlington
