By Floyd Wood, Corvallis
Here’s how we can reduce the national debt that’s on everyone’s mind these days.
Bring home all of our troops and war material from Japan, Philippines, Germany, Kosovo, possibly South Korea, and all the other foreign countries. We haven’t had a war that we needed to be in since WAR II!
As far as this mess in the Arab country, all they had to do was look at history. The French had their Foreign Legion over there fighting the Arabs for years, with no success. Then the Russians took a whack at them and lost, so what are we trying to prove?
We have over one thousand military installations on foreign soil. There are at least two in the Philippines, 268 in Germany, 124 in Japan, 87 in South Korea. These bases cost billions of dollars a year to maintain. They are dishing out $3 or $4 billion a year to each of these oil producing countries to butter them up. These are the same big oil companies that made $32 billion in the first three months of this year, up 30% from a year ago. They also get $4 billion in special tax breaks every year on top of it.
Now onto the trillions that we are spending on this present fiasco. We can pull out of these countries that we have had troops in since War Two, and, cut out these butter up hand outs and save a bundle.
An ironic thing is, those oil tankers that haul us oil are registered under foreign countries such as Panama and many other countries. When a tanker pulls in to load up I don’t think the suppliers give a damn where it is going as long as they get paid. So I would think this payola we are paying out goes into the dictators’ pockets.
Now on to the U.S. Government.
Shut down the outer space program, cut out the subsidies to the big ranchers and the ranch syndicates and the foreign countries that have big ranch holdings in this country, freeze the oil prices at a fair profit and do away with the big rip off that we now have.
I firmly believe the auto makers have been in bed with the oil companies for a long time. They brag that the small cars they have been selling for a long time are real gas savers, 25 and 26 miles to the gallon. I haven’t had a car in the last 40 years that didn’t get 36 miles to the gallon. Twenty years ago Honda sold one that got 50 miles to the gallon but I guess it didn’t sell because the buyers couldn’t make enough pump stops. The consumers of new cars are guilty of helping cause the gas prices. I see a lot of big SUVs and monster GMC-Ford-Dodge pickups and Humvees tooling around, many brand new, most of them unnecessary, vehicles that will get less than 20 miles to the gallon, most a lot less. The well-to-do and the wannabe’s have got to outdo the Joneses and show the poor folks they don’t have it. It’s the same with big houses. Who could possibly need the kind of monster houses that are being built today? People are building some seldom used, they are called summer homes.
So to quote Pogo Possom: We have met the enemy and they are us!