‘Now You Know the Rest of the Story’

To The Editor:
I am a baby boomer. There was no car seat for me in the family car. I ate penny candy and rarely drank soda. Kool-aid was a summer-only treat. I played outside all year long with the other kids and no one wore sunscreen. Television was black and white without a remote. I learned to drive a car in the fieIds when I was 9. I started a grass cutting business when I was 10. I paid less than a dollar for a gallon of gas and a quart of oil and my business grossed $23 a week in the summer. Life was good and government was smaller in 1960.
In a recent article by Stephen Moore in the Wall Street Journal he writes, “Today in America there are nearly twice as many people working for the gov-ernment (22.5 million) than in all of manufacturing (11.5 million). This is an almost exact reversal of the situation in 1960, when there were 15 million workers in manufacturing and 8.7 million collecting a paycheck from the government.”
Moore continues to write, “It gets worse. More Americans work for the government than work in construction, farming, fishing, forestry, manufactur-ing, mining and utilities combined. We have moved decisively from a nation of makers to a nation of tak-ers. Nearly half of the $2.2 trillion cost of state and local government is the $1trillion-a-year tab for pay and benefits of state and local employees. Is it any wonder that so many states and cities cannot pay their bills?”
During my childhood I owned a red Radio-Flyer wagon. My friends and I enjoyed taking turns pulling and pushing one another in that wagon. Inevitably there was always someone who used coercion or fraud to impose his or her will on the others in order to ride a little longer. As a result one would pull and two would ride. The puller tired more quickly and the riders got more comfortable being pulled along. The pace slowed and the protest and criticism from within the wagon did not improve the puller’s per-formance. Soon the lone puller stopped pulling and sat down in the wagon and no one pulled the wagon any longer.
In those famous words of the legendary radio host Paul Harvey; “Now you know the rest of the story.”
EDWARD REEVES
West Cape May