Liquidating the American Dream

by Sam Osborne

Re: Representative Wenthe Statehouse News 3-11-11

Dear Rep. Wenthe,

I will certainly support you in your effort to maintain what has become rusting and rotting infrastructure; however we also need to move forward into a new and better future.  For the cost of this repair, a hundred mile of new electric powered rail tracks could be built, and the maintenance cost of these miles of steel ribbon would be much less than that of concrete highways.

This prompts me to think back to my youth, when Iowa and the nation were moving forward into a new era and not leaving any of us college kids behind—back then they just seemed like some more good days in which a kid’s folks assumed that their children would live even better than they were.

Now I think of them as the good old days when to go to college you did not need a loan or any help from mom and dad.  And when you got out of college you had your choice of jobs, the older generation was not passing on a huge national debt to you, organized labor was helping  “common” laborers move into a growing middle class, and things were made in the USA and sold all over the world.

Those great economic times started right after GIs came home from winning WW II and continued up until Ronald Reagan ran up the largest debt in the nation’s history, let the infrastructure go to rust and rot, and started busting unions.  And Reagan’s debt and neglect were only exceeded by Georg W. Bush and Cheney.

Now the current crop of Republicans, with Gov. Branstad and Walker in the lead, want to finish the liquidation of the American Dream and run what is left off into the pockets of the folks that own them.

Sam Osborne
West Branch, Iowa

Sam
Osborne, former editorial writer and Opinion Page Editor,
Iowa City Press-Citizen; former college professor and Business Department chair,
Ellsworth Community College; and currently out to pasture drinking too much
coffee.  His commentary, The Obstructed View,  appears on this blog occasionally.