Voice of reason? Not quite
Issue date: 2/5/10 Section: Letters to the editor
We're writing this letter in response to one of your weekly columns' writer, Bill Kostkas.
He claims himself to be the "voice of reason" every week in the paper, but all we find in his column is complaining about President Barack Obama.
If he's the voice of reason, perhaps he can find some time to be reasonable.
Kostkas seems to be a microcosm of the modern Republican Party in Congress.
Rather than propose its own solutions to the problems this country is facing, it outright opposes anything brought forward by Democrats.
To Kostkas's claim this week about Obama needing to stop blaming President Bush, I might grant a bit of concession here.
However, I'm not sure if Kostkas is aware of the scope and magnitude of what the president inherited.
It's only been a year since he came into office and, according to many economists, it can take years to recover what we endured.
In response to Kostkas's claims that Obama's administration is being hypocritical in its response to the current economic crisis, I'd like to remind him that economists and public policy specialists agree on the roots of our current budget deficits.
The Clinton administration left office with a $200 billion surplus, but it was wasted by the next administration, which got the United States involved in two wars and passed a prescription drug benefit without paying for any of them.
The prescription drug plan cost over $400 billion and was not offset by any spending changes elsewhere in the budget, whereas the current healthcare proposals, while averaging $900 billion, are all paid for by changes in current policies and programs.
In fact, this proposal (according to the Congressional Budget Office) will decrease our budget deficit over the next decade.
So the argument that this administration is cleaning up for the previous one is true.
It's easy to burn down a house, but it takes a while to build a new one.
Perhaps some of the criticism we've leveled at Kostkas has been unfair, as neither of us have ever met him.
That notwithstanding, he doesn't seem to hide his political allegiance at all in his column every week and for that reason, we've decided to write this letter.
The main issue we take is that his column is called the "voice of reason" when it's clearly anything but that.
David Antonini
SRU Alum, '09
Seth Sykora-Bodie
Political Science, '11
He claims himself to be the "voice of reason" every week in the paper, but all we find in his column is complaining about President Barack Obama.
If he's the voice of reason, perhaps he can find some time to be reasonable.
Kostkas seems to be a microcosm of the modern Republican Party in Congress.
Rather than propose its own solutions to the problems this country is facing, it outright opposes anything brought forward by Democrats.
To Kostkas's claim this week about Obama needing to stop blaming President Bush, I might grant a bit of concession here.
However, I'm not sure if Kostkas is aware of the scope and magnitude of what the president inherited.
It's only been a year since he came into office and, according to many economists, it can take years to recover what we endured.
In response to Kostkas's claims that Obama's administration is being hypocritical in its response to the current economic crisis, I'd like to remind him that economists and public policy specialists agree on the roots of our current budget deficits.
The Clinton administration left office with a $200 billion surplus, but it was wasted by the next administration, which got the United States involved in two wars and passed a prescription drug benefit without paying for any of them.
The prescription drug plan cost over $400 billion and was not offset by any spending changes elsewhere in the budget, whereas the current healthcare proposals, while averaging $900 billion, are all paid for by changes in current policies and programs.
In fact, this proposal (according to the Congressional Budget Office) will decrease our budget deficit over the next decade.
So the argument that this administration is cleaning up for the previous one is true.
It's easy to burn down a house, but it takes a while to build a new one.
Perhaps some of the criticism we've leveled at Kostkas has been unfair, as neither of us have ever met him.
That notwithstanding, he doesn't seem to hide his political allegiance at all in his column every week and for that reason, we've decided to write this letter.
The main issue we take is that his column is called the "voice of reason" when it's clearly anything but that.
David Antonini
SRU Alum, '09
Seth Sykora-Bodie
Political Science, '11
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