Your editorial is a little disingenuous blaming the current budget situation on the president and the Republicans in Congress. What spending have the Democrats opposed? One of their big problems with the Medicare prescription drug bill was that it didn't spend enough!

You say that the deficit drives up interest rates, increasing the cost of mortgages. I purchased my home in 1999 and the mortgage rate was 7.125 percent Today, rates on 30-year mortgages are below 6 percent.

You also say that the deficit limits job growth. But unemployment in December reached a low of 4.5 percent!

Maybe if you put some of the positive news about the economy on the front page of the paper, you'd be able to find it and be better informed. Didn't we just have a year of record tax receipts?

You mentioned the House approving the pay-as-you-go-rule, and of course you mention that it would require lawmakers to increase taxes to cover any increased spending. You could have just as easily mentioned that Congress could also decrease spending elsewhere to cover new spending. The easy decision is to raise taxes.

Didn't Congress change the rule that required a three-fifths majority to raise taxes to a simple majority? What tax rate are you comfortable with? Where does it stop?

The problem with liberals is that they want to raise taxes because they favor income redistribution. They call this "fairness." Why can't the policy be to control spending and have tax rates low for every taxpayer?

The federal government will spend close to $9,000 for every person in this country. If your readers take the number of people in their immediate family, multiply it by $9,000 and compare this with how much they paid the federal government, I think they'll see that there is not a tax problem; there is a spending problem.

Scott Duman

Moorestown