Government Should

Defer To The Private Sector

To the Editor:

Whatever your political affiliation, most of us would agree that two things have to happen before we return to the economic power we were 20 years ago. The first is for all governments to get out of businesses that the private sector can do better and cheaper. This would reduce deficit spending from the federal level down to the local level. The second thing that most of us would agree on is that we need to create jobs in the private sector and reduce jobs in government. This would reduce unemployment, get people back to work and reduce unemployment benefits which are killing both our state and federal governments.

Governments are like addicts, they like to spend money that they don’t have. The federal government is presently increasing our national debt by $4 billion/day — not per week or per month but per day! Last time I checked that was $4 billion per day.

So what does the town of Newtown decide to do with their friends in Washington under the FEMA program? They decide to get into the brush and tree removal business. If we prioritized the areas that we would like to see our government spend money on, it would be in education, national security, defense, Medicare, or social security. I doubt that brush removal would make anyone’s top 1,000 list.

In my opinion, storm damage on private property is the responsibility of one party only and that is the owner of that private property. We should take care of our own property or enlist the help of family or friends. If it’s not possible to tackle the job ourselves, we could contact any one of dozens of very qualified tree companies that specialize in this work. What a novel idea! We would actually generate jobs for local tree businesses which would decrease local unemployment and get the government out of our business.

Most homeowners have a small woodlot on their own property but instead of dragging the brush back into the woods to let mother nature do what she has been doing for millions of years, many have dragged it out to the curb so the government can spend our money chipping it up and filling up our landfill. This, like many government boondoggles, has been filled with abuses and waste.

I feel that we (the private sector) should actually be trying to solve our own problems. We should be solving our own problems because, as we all know, we have a federal government that is on a collision course to place us in bankruptcy in a few years. Our federal government has been an embarrassment to us all with an approval rating of nine percent and an executive branch over the last 12 years which is not too far behind.

Frank Gardner

6 Surrey Trail Sandy Hook,                                      December 6, 2011