LETTER: Political system like boiling frog

To the editor: 
   Put a frog in a pot of hot water and it immediately jumps out, but put a frog in cold water that is. being heated to boiling and the frog dies.
   Today we are the frog equivalent, placed in cold water that is being heated to boiling.
   We are totally ignoring the aging of our infrastructure and don’t want to pay to update.
   An example is the Hamilton Township School System with a potential $130 million cost to repair school building roofs after inaction over the years because the tax rate would increase.
   Guess what happens now.
   The two percent cap on school budgets and municipal budgets just further putting off maintaining buildings because of increased taxes.
   So pay for it now or pay for it later.
   Our highway maintenance is paid for through gasoline taxes, yet our cars are getting increased mileage per gallon and that form of tax revenue is decreasing.
   The highways still need to be maintained but we don’t increase the gasoline tax to pay for this maintenance, so no maintenance.
   We have a state pension system for government employees including teachers, state workers, police, prison guards, etc. but we did not fund the pension program yearly and now the pension system is $90 billion short in paying its pension and healthcare obligations.
   Our politicians did not want to raise taxes or increase employee contributions to pay for these obligations.
   Our costs for healthcare have become a major factor in our GNP, yet our politicians spend every moment trying to eliminate affordable healthcare when we should follow the rest of the modern world with universal healthcare.
   So, the previous system of emergency room healthcare for the uninsured is paid for by the rest of us with health insurance at absurd billing rates to cover the uninsured.
   Our national efforts are directed by political charlatans only concerned with eliminating abortion rights, same sex marriage, immigration reform, gun control, the teaching of evolution, the existence of global warming, and punishing the poor and unemployed, or spending to employ people.
   We are a nation under the control of corporate lobbyists doling out money to elected officials who are the best money can buy.
   We mindlessly recite in or Pledge of Allegiance the falsehood of “one nation under God along with liberty and justice for all,” which just proves that we, like the frog, do not recognize the pot of water we are in is getting very hot.
   Is getting re-elected to continue doing nothing about the issues of infrastructure repair and maintenance, healthcare costs, funding pension obligations, education funding, poverty, unemployment, gun control, immigration, campaign contribution reform, property tax reform, prison reform, inefficiency of multiple governments, effects of global warming, etc. what we want?
   We seem to prefer not paying our obligations as they occur, but rather putting them on our tab for future payments.
   That is when we get over our addiction to electing those that tell us only what we want to hear and not the truth.
   When the water boils it will be too late.
Eugene E. Sarafin
Hightstown 