EDITOR:

Listening and reading about the comments Mr. Obama and his pals in Congress are making daily about what their health care plan will cost etc, I wonder if they are getting ready to compete in a fishing derby. They are certainly stretching the truth about what their health care bill will do and what it will cost. So like good fishermen they seem to make up numbers that cannot be authenticated, but they sound good to too many Americans. What is that old axiom, if it sounds too good, it must not be true.

Remember when Mr. Obama said back when he was campaigning that 95 percent of the American people will not have their taxes raised. Since the Baucus bill in the Senate has not been written but is only in "conceptual language," one is not able to get a dollar handle on it. But here are some of the tax increases that have been mentioned: a tax on high cost health insurance plans, penalties for people not having insurance, and something called "indirect offsets." There is also a lot of pork thrown in for four favored states. These lucky states such as Nevada and New York and a couple other states in the Baucus plan will have the other 46 states pick up their Medicaid payments. Not a bad deal for incumbent senators in those states facing tough re election races.

I guess Mr. Obama when he listened to Mr. Davis, a Marxist, and studied at those elite schools, never had a course on how the free market works. Now he is using a method favored by such wonderful characters as Hitler and Mao known as divide and conquer. Get the people focused on some group and make them the enemy. Right now he is after the insurance industry. He also does not understand that the profit motive is why people start up a business. To him profit is a dirty word.

The last thing on my plate today is how Mr. Obama is bankrupting our country. President Bush did a very foolish thing when he got the TARP nonsense started. Mr. Obama has used this method to increase the debt with his stimulus program. He uses the word crisis at every problem that comes up and compares the present economic condition to the Great Depression. Evidently he slept during the time Jimmy Carter was in office when we had long lines at the gas stations, interest rates up near 20 percent and our embassy in Iran was taken over. Now if Mr. Obama continues his spending nonsense, we could relive the 1930s. What has bailed us out of past economic downturns is very simple: lower taxes, cut government programs, and let the people who know how to run businesses, do it. This strategy worked for Harding in the 1920s, Kennedy in the 1960s, Reagan in the 1980s, and Bush in the 2000s. Mr. Obama must have slept through any classes that mentioned these success stories.

If Mr. Obama is serious about putting people back to work, he might do a little reading on what these people did in between golfing and shooting baskets. Too many people are hurting and they need the right kind of leadership.

James A. Hirn

Escanaba