To the Editor:
Re “Tax Reform Vision” (column, Dec. 3):
David Brooks’s vision of tax reform, like classical economics, is based on the illusion that our politicians are rational actors with the best interests of the country at heart.
That is plausibly true of President Obama, but not of the Republican Party, which long ago decided that this administration’s failure was its only worthy goal.
No matter how many Americans remain jobless, or lose their homes, or die of curable illnesses or choke on the dust of the World Trade Center caught in their lungs, Republicans remain dedicated to obstructing anything that might actually help the country, and therefore be claimed by the Obama administration as a success.
Democrats have hardly covered themselves in glory, but the Republican response to Mr. Obama’s election is shockingly unpatriotic, and true conservatives should reject it for the nihilism that it is.
David Berman
New York, Dec. 3, 2010
Note from KBJ: Where was the letter writer when Democrats obstructed George W. Bush, hoping thereby to make his adminstration a failure? I recall Democrats hoping that the United States failed in Iraq. How's that for being unpatriotic?
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 