Verne Frost did get one thing right (“Is the USA a democracy?” April 27, 2014.  Yuma Sun).   Our founders, students of history, knew that democracies morphed into mob rule.  Students of philosophy, they understood as well the weakness of the human character and designed a system of government that would be less vulnerable to tyranny of any kind, a republic, but as Benjamin Franklin predicted and Verne Frost says, we have not kept it very well.

               However to blame the “do nothing” congress on the Republican Party is the absolute reverse of the truth.  The Republican house passed measure after measure and budget after budget every year, but every bill died because the Democrat leadership in the senate refused to bring any of the bills to the floor for discussion.  Harry Reid, apparently afraid he didn’t have a tight enough control over his majority, would not risk letting the senate even discuss the bills.

               Republicans foresaw the disaster the Affordable Care Act would foist on the American people, so they tried with 5 consecutive bills to ameliorate the damage.  Once again, however, their proposals never made it out of Harry Reed’s office. It is interesting to note, however, that every proposal the Republicans recommended were actually enacted by Presidential fiat, the executive order.  Really, now Verne, don’t you wish we had read the law before we passed it?

               Mr. Frost is also wrong about our free enterprise system.  It did not fail the American people.  It is the diabolical marriage of government and industry that failed us.  George Bush warned congress over and over again that the housing bubble would burst and destroy the middle class, but ­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­Barney Frank, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee scoffed at him, and democrats, in bed with the mortgage industry kept pumping our money into the failing over inflated market.  When the bubble blew, all of us lost half of the equity in our homes.

               Although republicans do not have clean hands when it comes to the diabolical marriage of government and industry and the national debt,   any thinking person would admit that a huge portion of the blame rests at the feet of the Democrat Party.  They have been buying votes with empty promises for 100 years and those mandatory spending programs eat up 70 per cent of our national budget and add millions of dollars to the national debt every time we take a breath.

               I wish the Tea Party could take over the Republican Party.  Its aims, to limit the power of government and rein in the federal spending would serve the country well, but neither Republicans nor Democrats would put their cushy jobs in jeopardy by telling the truth and making decisions necessary to protect our children and grandchildren from the burden of debt we are leaving them.  Taking into account the debt along with the unfunded liabilities, my newest great-grandson, due in August, will born with a $400,00 share of the national debt chained to his delicate little leg.