Coping With the Deficit

Thank you for reminding us that our economy needs more than a Band-Aid for a quick fix. The staggering deficit makes it imprudent to trust conventional wisdom, which dictates manipulating fiscal policy by cutting taxes to pump money into the system during times of recession. What is needed is a long-range economic plan that will increase our productivity through promoting investment in both human and capital resources.

If repairing our decaying infrastructure and developing our human resources through retraining and education result in an increase in the deficit, so be it. We can afford to borrow to promote economic growth. What we cannot permit is a continuation of the laissez-faire policies of the ‘80s, which mistakenly persuaded us that tax cuts would result in investment. We have awakened to a view of that decade as a time of profligate private and public consumption as we basked in a false glow of prosperity on borrowed money.

JEAN RAUN, Laguna Beach