To the editor:

I am compelled to respond to Mr. Brauer’s Teabagger-Party-style rant.

Again, I firmly believe that “silence is the voice of complicity,” so I will speak my mind.

I guess I should clear up a misunderstanding about definitions.

I consider myself a conservative person, whereas I consider the “so-called conservatives,” or Republicans, or “tea party types” as profligate spenders. There isn’t a tax cut or a war that they seem to dislike. I consider them the “lower taxes and borrow for endless war” crowd. War is good for the “so-called conservatives,” as demonstrated by the high profits made by the oil/military/congressional complex.

Again, it appears that Mr. Brauer may be what he considers a conservative, and what

I would consider a person to be lacking a short-term memory, so short he didn’t remember my letter.

A point of clarification: In his letter, he said that, “it is interesting that there was no solution offered where the cash will come from to pay for the new health plan.” But in my letter, I identified that we could save the trillions being wasted on war to pay for “taking care of our own citizens by educating and caring for them.”

You may not be aware of it, Mr. Brauer, but when “so-called conservatives” rail against high taxes, my guess is that most of them are not knowledgeable about how much of their tax dollar goes where. They go on with little sound bites they have learned from television about “tax and spend liberals” and “how the liberals are spending our economy into hell,” but never mention the following facts.

One of the biggest tax hikes in history was perpetrated by Ronald Reagan, a “so-called conservative,” through a raise in the FICA tax on the middle/working class when he was president. Where were you anti-tax people then?

It is a fact that at least 33 percent of the American tax dollars collected in 2009 went to the Pentagon and war. If one were to include “off the books” expenditures, this percentage could be as high as 60 percent. This is fact.

Let’s compare this to total expenditures toward diplomacy, development and war prevention. Now you would think that a country that professes to be a “Christian nation that loves peace” as most “so-called conservatives” like to think, that this would be a big part of the budget, but it isn’t. This effort at peace only garners about 1 percent of our tax money. Universal healthcare and education for all Americans would be a mere drop in the bucket compared to what is spent on war and war-profiteering each year in America.

As Matthew 6:21 says, “for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”

Dan Freeman

Clinton