Great letter in the Chronicle today responding to an op-ed from former Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert, who wants to be a Senator:

“In Leppert's world, boldness is not addressing the deep structural problems at the heart of America's economic woes but in trotting out the very policies that created the problems in the first place and boldly proclaiming them as a cure.

“Since the early 1980s, when Ronald Reagan somehow redefined the country's government as the country's primary problem, top marginal tax rates and capital gains taxes have been cut in half.

“In the 1990s, welfare was pretty much reformed out of existence, reducing cash benefits to a life-time limit of five years. The number of federal government employees as a percentage of total population is at its lowest since the 1950s. There have been massive rollbacks in government regulation of the energy, communication, transportation and finance industries.

“The end result of this 30-year tax-cutting, deregulating, privatizing experiment is a collapsed housing market, enormous income inequality, ruined pensions, decreased access to affordable healthcare and a child poverty rate of 20 percent.

“Whereas Leppert presents his plan as something new, it is anything but. Rather than a blueprint for rebuilding America's economy, it merely represents a continuation of the dismantling of the American dream, already 30 years in the unmaking.”

- Hugh Sample, Pasadena