An excerpt from a Philadelphia Daily News editorial ("Congress keeps fliers from inconvenient truth," May 2) subscribes to the widely held notion that spending is good for the economy. So the sequester must be bad because it imposes "severe across-the-board cuts to spending."
Just as there are reasonable people who insist spending is good for the economy, so there are others who disagree. They reason that spending your way out of debt makes no sense.
Here is the inconvenient truth: The country is bankrupt. If the Federal Reserve didn't print money, the Treasury would not be able to pay its bills. Mandatory spending (Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid and interest on debt and other entitlement programs) takes up more than half of the budget and demands more each year.
The sequester calls for $109 billion in reductions to military and domestic programs for the year starting Oct. 1. That still leaves a deficit of about $973 billion for fiscal year 2013. And the national debt is already nearly $17 trillion.
Democrats and Republicans are turning us and our grandchildren into tax slaves. The only growth that will solve this is in money and credit supplied by the Federal Reserve. When our dollars are no longer trusted as a store of value, the jig will be up. The process of rejecting the dollar as reserve currency is already under way. When all of those trillions of dollars are rejected and sent back here, waiting for flights will be the least of our problems.
Werner Hetzner
Cohoes