Money well wasted

Well, it didn't take long, just a few short hours, for liberal politicians and the dominant media culture to politicize a tragedy. The dust had hardly settled in Minnesota when a Minnesota state representative said "we would have money to fix our bridges if we weren't in Iraq." Figures.

The truth of the matter is, what's unnecessarily tying up our resources is not the war in Iraq, but rather all of the money being spent on giving entitlements to people who aren't entitled to squat.

The Constitution clearly spells out that the federal government's responsibility is to pay for our nation's defense and infrastructure, not entitlements. The war in Iraq clearly falls under the national defense category.

If you want to blame government spending policy on our lack of funds for infrastructure, fine, then put the blame where blame is due. Giving Medicare, Medicaid, driver's licenses, education, and other tax payer funded government benefits to illegal immigrants is the problem, not war funding.

If we want to redirect government funds away from programs that don't deserve them or don't have a Constitutional mandate, then we need to quit throwing piles of money at criminal immigrants and quit rewarding laziness by paying citizens who have no other ambition than living off of government in perpetuity, and put that money towards our infrastructure. That would be money well spent, not money well wasted.

Jim Chitty