Tag Archives: balanced budget

A Letter to Leaders

Dear leaders,
Everyday there are opportunities for principled compromise and proximate justice in your service. Some questions to guide your actions:
Do you care about the poor or your power?

Do you want hospitable, legal and secure immigration or talking points?
Can you critique ideas and policies without exaggeration and insult?
Will your secure our financial future with a balanced budget, or just pretend that it does not matter?
Will you look for partnerships or do you prefer polemics and “gotchas’?
Will you fashion reparations as access, equity, and opportunity or another way to stoke resentment?
Will you affirm freedom of conscience and religion and allow people to bring their best selves to the public square, or will you despise the very traditions that offer your current liberties?
Are you willing to normalize your pensions and retirements, saving buckets of money, and serve the public without thought to your gain?
In short, will you be adults, reflecting before reacting, negotiating instead of just negating, and offering vision for the future?


Positive Politics, Part 2

Dear Republicans:
Will you make history or miss another moment and pass the problems forward?
Courage, humility and unselfish love compels action. Please begin negotiating and passing bipartisan legislation that benefits the most people possible.

You may never get the extreme Left to join you, but there are persons of conscience and common good that want to refine healthcare, improve infrastructure, secure our borders and transform immigration.

Please create budgets that move us toward debt reduction. If you care about efficiency and ethics, please transform systems so resources get to the people that need them. You were elected to create a new environment in Washington, D.C. Simplify tax laws, stop currying favor with lobbyists and making side deals.

We just endured 8 years of opaque contempt for dialogue. Please do not make the same mistakes. Forge friendships across every aisle.

Regardless of your distaste or support for the President, you have a moral obligation to bring legislation for signature. “Open covenants openly arrive at…” should be the norm, including laws the average person can read and understand. President Reagan and Speaker O/Neill negotiated. President Clinton and Speaker Gingrich were not friends, but came the closest to a balanced budget since 1967.

It just takes courage, humility and love for the American people.