We need healthy children with happy homes and parents that love them and have time for them. We need educational institutions that support that kind of family. We need educated citizens, with a sense of history and hope for the future. We need clean water and clean air in our cities and an environmental policy structure that keeps the surrounding countryside clean. We need good honest businesses that provide jobs and the products and services that make our lives better. We need a national energy policy that recognizes the fiscal and moral disaster we are creating by our dependence on tyrannical leaders for our oil supply. We do not need more wars that replace them in the hope that the new government will allow us to continue on the same path to our ruin.

We need homes for our people that they can afford in neighborhoods where they can enjoy living in safety and security. We need a society where ethnic differences are celebrated not denigrated and the huge contribution of the working poor to our society's prosperity is recognized. We need a pride in our communities and a willingness to commit the time and effort to make them places that make us proud. We need economically strong states and cities with infrastructure that promotes the public welfare and provides for the common good. We need leadership that will tell us the truth and take responsibility for their actions, not leaders that spend millions on finding the right spin to fool us into believing them when they are lying to us.

The tax plan passed by Congress and signed into law with great fanfare by our President will diminish the chance of us having any of those things our nation needs any time soon. It leaves every child behind the eight ball for the debts we are piling on their backs. This is a national debt that will not be due until they are in their most productive years and it is too late for them to do anything about the tax breaks that created it. This tax cut cynically divides the haves from the have-nots in our nation and rewards the haves with extraordinary added income from wealth not work. It disadvantages the workers in our society and it will not create the jobs our President has declared as the purpose for this tax break. It diminishes the money available for our national security here at home, where it is needed. Meanwhile we are increasing the amount of money spent on our military, which can only be used in foreign wars. These will inevitably be wars that lessen the trust the people of the world have for our nation. It cynically removes funds from the national budget that are badly needed for education, childcare and medical care for our poorer children. It has been used to enhance the perception that our President is a powerful advocate for our people. Upon analysis however it demonstrates that he is only concerned with the good of those who paid for his last campaign and will pay for this one. This tax cut is a cynical, cruel sham of a gift to our people. It must be repealed before it does the damage to our nation that it will do if its terms are carried out.

We are a nation in the process of change; we have grown far more conservative in my lifetime. Conservative as a word has come to mean new and frightening things. It has come to mean that you support wars of conquest in the name of security for us and for no others. Wars waged against weapons that could be delivered with a spray bottle that costs two dollars. It has come to mean that the environment is not the concern of conservatives and we can exploit it to our hearts content. It has come to mean the support of laws like the "Patriot Act" a law that will live in infamy because of its attack on our constitutional rights. It has come to mean support for international trade while jobs that support our families are shipped to other nations. To nations where the wages paid workers do not support a healthy middle class. The new meaning of conservative has come to mean the separation between church and state is constantly under assault. To conserve is to save for the future. You must ask yourself what you are saving for your children if you are truly conservative. If this tax cut and the patriot act are your answers I can be certain that all of our children are being left behind. God bless and keep you and all of our children safe now and in the future.