Our leaders have not earned our trust

Glen D. Burnett, Las Vegas

Saturday, Aug. 15, 2009 | 2:02 a.m.

The public is afraid and our leaders are without a clue. The reason for all the disruptions at town-hall meetings is fear.

The public knows health care is a mess, and that Medicare and Medicaid are in serious financial trouble. The politicians cannot understand why they cannot get the public to listen to their proposals. The reason is lack of trust.

Our representatives have repeatedly shown that they cannot be trusted by their lack of ethics and morals as they feather their beds at the expense of their constituents. I can remember when our representatives were respected, even when they were sometimes disagreed with.

The pork-barrel spending the public abhors, the stimulus payments to the crooks who robbed the public, the gas guzzler payments to those who ignored what was happening, and the bailouts to those who misused their credit cards and bought houses they could not afford are all hated by those of us who paid their bills on time and bought only what we could afford and tried to save for our retirement.

We received no benefit from our frugal lifestyle and because we are responsible we now must lose the value of what we have saved so that the wasteful ones can be bailed out. They won’t suffer for their wasteful ways but we must suffer for them. We lose because we chose to think of the future instead of living the high life on borrowed money.

We are afraid that whatever our untrustworthy politicians come up with will be worse than what we have. Health care inflation is horrendous and must be corrected, but no one has presented any lucid plan that will fix what we have.