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[Ed. Note: The following was written by Robert Ricketts, Democrat, running for congress in Texas]
We need change in Washington. For the past six years, the Republican Party has been in the driver's seat in Washington and they are lost. None of their plans are working. Indeed, everything they have done has failed. Consider where they have brought us.
Our federal government is, quite literally, bankrupt. Our national debt is approaching 10 trillion dollars and it owns assets of only a fraction of this amount. George Bush promised to cut the national debt in half. Instead, by the time he leaves office, he and the Republican Congress will have doubled it.
Our tax system is so broken that it asks the least from those who have the most, leaving the burden of paying for government on the backs of the middle class, and increasingly, on the backs of the next generation.
Interest rates are up, gas prices are up, and wages are down.Our jobs are being outsourced to India and China, or "insourced" to undocumented workers from Mexico, South America and Eastern Europe.
We have the lowest rate of job growth in the past 40 years and the average wage has not kept up with inflation.
We have the most expensive health care system in the world and it covers the lowest percentage of our citizens of any other developed nation.
The average costs of tuition and fees at institutions of higher education have grown much faster than inflation. Yet, the Republican Congress cut $12.7 billion from student financial aid and loan programs, and doubled the interest rate on student loans.
Texas agriculture producers are facing the biggest losses in state history. Yet our Congress has yet to pass emergency disaster relief. More importantly for Texas farmers and ranchers, the Republican Party has been signaling for months that it does not support the farm program.
And, lest we forget, we have almost 150,000 of our brave troops fighting wars in the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan while their representatives back home hand out tax cuts to the rich. Worse, in order to protect those tax cuts, they have slashed veterans' benefits. We like to say that freedom isn't free - why is the Republican Congress unwilling to pay for it?
The Republican Party is lost. It has followed Tom Delay, Jack Abramoff, Dick Cheney and the rest of the crew so far into the desert that it cannot find its way back. This year, this election is about change. Democrats know the way out of this mess. Our problems are big, but they can be solved. It's time to roll up our sleeves and get to work. Let's start on November 7th.
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