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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: greenspirit who wrote (220894)	1/22/2002 11:39:55 AM
From: Neocon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Strange. Now this is a good one for conservative columnists to jump on......

To: greenspirit who wrote (220894)	1/22/2002 11:45:11 AM
From: Mana	Respond to of 769670

Maybe there is hope for America. Cut government down to size By ANDREW WIDENER I am a 15-year-old student with very conservative views, and I am often at odds with my friends at school over social issues. However, there is much broader agreement concerning the size of the government and its role in economic matters. I believe there are more and more young people who realize that having a big government is more of a vice than a virtue. When President Clinton said that the era of big government was over in the middle of his first term in office, many voters, most of them probably not in Clinton's own party, rejoiced. Perhaps they remembered when Ronald Reagan, bucking a 50-year trend of viewing government growth as necessary and effective, declared, "Government is not the solution. Government is the problem." Despite the anti-government-growth rhetoric that has shifted the debate in the past 20 years to streamlining bureaucracy, there has been little or no action to significantly reduce the size of the federal government, and there is nearly universal support in the Congress among both parties that its scope and power must further increase. The federal government's role, as envisioned by the Founding Fathers and outlined in the Constitution, is to protect America from attack by foreign powers. One of the reasons the terrorists were so successful in their attacks on our sovereign territory was that the U.S. government is more focused on Social Security and a Patients Bill of Rights than on protecting American citizens and American soil. Further, thousands of United States servicemen and women are stationed around the world like a global police force when they should be here defending our borders from foreign attacks and uncontrolled immigration. If the lawmakers in Washington would realize their proper constitutional roles and fulfill them, this country would function more smoothly and efficiently and we would not have to deal with a federal government incapacitated by its own enormity. Last summer it puzzled me when I heard on the news that President Bush had erased from the Republican Party platform the part that called for the termination of the Department of Education. If the Republicans truly wished to reduce the size of the federal government, it would seem only natural to start with the most gravely misguided and preposterously overfunded entity. Americans are taxed to death to pay for their children's educations, and then forced to settle for mediocrity or failure. Among the many federal programs that are unconstitutional, Social Security is undoubtedly the poster child. Nowhere in the Constitution does it even vaguely mention a federal redistribution of wealth or any sort of financial program to aid anyone. The reason for the continued existence of Social Security is that politicians are too cowardly to tell people to save money for their own retirements instead of sucking the economic life out of the contributors. This statement would risk the wrath of the potent senior citizen voting bloc, which would oust any candidate in a heartbeat who opposes their unlawful socialist retirement benefits. Besides straying far from its original design, the system is bankrupt, and privatizing it under government supervision would prove disastrous, as would its continued operation in an old-style Marxist format. We can either end Social Security now and refund the taxpayers' money while there still is some or wait 10 years until the system is bankrupt and owes $3 trillion to American seniors. You may think that I am an extremist or wonder why a teenager would espouse such reactionary views, but without a return to the original intent of the Constitution, we risk losing our fundamental rights and liberties. One must not forget that, as Barry Goldwater once said, "Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice." Let's all agree to preserve our cherished liberties and return the government to the people. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Andrew Widener, of Sharpsburg, is a sophomore at Woodward Academy.