Dear Editor:

The financial situation our country is facing right now should get every working, tax-paying American’s undivided attention. Our elected officials are working on a plan to bail out banking and mortgage companies for billions of dollars worth of bad decisions that they made while collecting huge salaries and bonuses.

All of this money can come from one source and one source only. It has to come from the people who work and pay taxes. Politicians don’t work and pay taxes. They collect checks from taxes paid by the working class. They working class pays the politicians’ salary, medical, retirement, Social Security and vacation pay with the money they pay in taxes. The working class pays income taxes, sales taxes, gasoline taxes, tobacco taxes, land taxes, ad valorem taxes, capital gains taxes, inheritance taxes and, worst of all, taxes to the mortician for burial services. That doesn’t even get me to the sin taxes. Lord, I need to start going to church more.

“Blue-collar workers” is a term used a lot when it comes to the working class. I guess I could be considered a blue-collar worker because I wear a blue shirt every day. I think it’s blue since people tell me it’s blue, but I’m color blind so I have to trust people to tell me what color it is.

Blue-collar workers know how it feels to get up every day and go to work so they can provide for their needs. Blue collar workers know how it feels to do that and realize that what is left after taxes doesn’t leave enough to provide for those needs.

This $750 billion bailout is not for blue collar America. It is for big bank and mortgage CEOs to continue their lavish lifestyles. There is nothing in this thing that will help the everyday working stiff. But I have a solution.

Instead of giving these big-shot CEOs billions of dollars to spend on some secluded island somewhere, why not use it to keep some working people in their homes? Buy these mortgages that are being, or about to be, foreclosed. Buy these mortgages for pennies on the dollar and tell these otherwise, soon-to-be working homeless people that they can stay in their homes.

The next step is somewhat simple. Use some of that money to set up a system whereby the working people can pay their mortgage payments at a reduced rate, since we bought the mortgages at pennies on the dollar. All these non-working politicians say we need change; now wouldn’t that be some kind of a change?

I have heard a lot of rhetoric from a lot of politicians who blame this on the ordinary working people who applied for loans they couldn’t afford. It was politicians who put that train wreck on the tracks to start with. Now the politicians want to fix it all with a plan that would still leave these people homeless. I say “no.”

Don’t bail out a bunch of rich cats that have already made millions of dollars from this. Reach out to those working people who got suckered into your idiotic policies to start with.

I’m not a United States senator, but if I was this would be burning in my innermost being right now.

Butch Wells

Troy