LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

What's really good for the USA?

Posted

To the editor:

Every now and then, the most backward wing of extremists in the Grand “Oil” Party tries to refloat concepts rejected by history.

One is that gasoline prices will fall if government deregulates the petroleum industry.

Have you noticed where gas prices are heading? 

Since Trump took office, they have skyrocketed, already nudging $3 a gallon for regular, and predicted by a number of experts to be headed to $5. 

The GOP has been trotting out petroleum lies since the Harding administration and gave us the Teapot Dome scandal.

Another area of its historical fiction is that attempts by government to prevent overreaching against consumers by Wall Street are unnecessary and deleterious. After the Great Depression (another gift from the GOP) hit us, when Congress initially held hearings on the need for legislation to prevent stock fraud, the president of the New York Stock Exchange, Richard Whitney, testified that he would see to it that the exchange policed itself. 

A few years later, Mr. Whitney went to jail for stock fraud.

An additional perennial GOP myth has been called the trickle-down theory of economics, i.e., appeasement of the greedy, not the needy, because giving more to the super-rich causes greater economic growth.

It did not work out that way when states competed with one another to see who could lure more big business by giving away more tax breaks or making it harder to be represented by labor unions. A race to the bottom is not progress.

In my own lifetime, I recall about 65 years ago the congressional testimony of Charles Erwin Wilson, the president of General Motors, when President Eisenhower nominated him as defense secretary. He was asked how he would act if a choice would be good for the nation but bad for GMC. He replied, in substance, that anything good for the USA was good for GMC, and vice versa. 

Alan Saks

Alan Saks

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