An Open Letter to President Obama

Dear President Obama:

This is an open letter to you from the American People.  We congratulate you on winning the election, and look forward to your second term as President.  You continue speak to us of hope and change, and a new dawn for America’s future.  Many of us are still waiting for these changes to begin.  We will grant you that we are living in a complicated world and our country is faced with numerous challenges. 

During your first term as President you helped our country navigate through extremely troubled waters, and we are not out of them yet.  We continue to face extremely challenging times with unemployment rates still climbing, our economy struggling on the brink of another recession with the upcoming “fiscal cliff,” and Americans continuing to struggle to keep their families going. 

Over the last four years you have enacted programs and regulations that were necessary to prevent our country from falling into a second Great Depression. You also took steps to address the growing healthcare costs, and created programs to assist those Americans who are struggling.  Further, given that our economy is consumer driven, and businesses and individuals were unable to consume as much as they used to, it was necessary for the government to intervene, and funnel aide to those areas of the economy that needed it. 

It is because of these actions that we still have a country, and are not facing the austerity measures being enacted in Greece, Spain, Italy and other countries around the world.  At the time when our nation was reeling from the devastating blows of the 2008 housing bubble, these policies and programs were necessary, and are what prevented our country and our economy, for collapsing.

While we are not yet out of the troubled waters, we have reached a point where we face a choice.  You and our government can continue down the current path of continued spending, which will increase our debt to the point where we will never be able to pay it down, or you can follow a path that begins to decrease our spending, and return control to the hands of the private sector.  You can either create an even bigger entitlement state in which everyone is dependent on the government, or you can return control to the individual and their families.  These are the choices that you face, and we the people are requesting that you be more pragmatic and use common sense in making your choices during your second term as President.

We ask that you continue the programs that offer assistance to those who truly need it, while weeding out those individuals who are abusing it.  We ask that you close down unnecessary governmental programs that simply waste our dollars.  We ask that you create a balanced budget and no longer continue to spend money that we don’t have.  We ask that you allow the producers of our society, the businessmen, to have more leeway to invest where they need to, and spend where they can, and not be taxed to death by the government.  We ask that you remember the founding principles of this nation.  We ask that you use common sense, rationality and pragmatism in guiding our country.

In closing Mr. President, we ask you to lead this country with vision, strength, moral leadership, and most of all common sense.  We also ask not forget those traditions that make our country great: individual freedom, capitalism, and personal responsibility.  These are the principles that should now guide you, and all of us, into the bright future and help us regain our strong position in the world.

                                                Sincerely,

                                                We the People of The United States of America