Ah, David, I love the predictable way that conservatives always complain about government spending when the Democrats are in power but all we hear is crickets when the Republicans blow up the national deficit with tax cuts for the rich (“Financial woes and rising gas prices,” published Dec. 15). Every Republican administration since, and including Reagan, has done this, and, of course, they never say no to increases in defense spending, even though we spend more on defense than the next 10 countries combined.

Just for the record, here’s a brief rundown of the national debt, starting with Reagan, the initiator of “Trickle Down” economics: Reagan’s term, according to the Federal Reserve Economic Data, started with the debt at 31.15 percent of GDP. Under Reagan and Bush No. 1, the debt increased to 62.52 percent. Under the Clinton administration the debt decreased to 54.25 percent and we were actually paying down the debt. Then came Bush No. 2 and he immediately claimed that was the people’s money and he was going to give it back to us in the form of very small tax cuts for Joe Citizen and huge tax cuts for the rich. Then he took our country into two unfunded wars and the worst recession since The Great Depression, again blowing up the national debt to 73.24 percent. Unfortunately the Obama administration had to do a huge amount of deficit spending to get our country out of that recession causing the national debt to explode to 105.31 percent. But, even though that was a troubling amount of debt, the Trump administration had no trouble, again, giving huge tax cuts to the rich, downplaying the severity of the pandemic and increasing the national debt to 129.19 percent of GDP.

So when you see the conservatives pointing fingers at the Democrats for increasing deficit spending, be aware that the Republicans only complain about it when the spending is to help the general population and not just the super rich.

On another note, David’s previous column regarding the free and fair election that he, again, claimed wasn’t really free and fair even though 60 some courts denied the claims of fraud (“Biden may have won the election, but it’s clear it wasn’t the most ‘free and fair’”, published Oct. 27, 2021). His claim that the courts didn’t really look at the evidence, hinting that there might have really been something there if the courts had only taken the time to look at it. Here’s the big scoop on that theory David, the reason the courts didn’t look at the evidence is, because there wasn’t any evidence. Just sayin’.

Larry Benson

Enumclaw