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November 15, 2008

Group takes aim at government debt

By Charles Oliver

The federal debt currently comes to about $10 trillion. That doesn’t include some $5 trillion in obligations the federal government has recently taken on as part of its bailout of financial institutions. Nor does it include some $41 trillion in unfunded liabilities for Medicare and Social Security.

John McMillian, chairman of the board of directors of Taxpayers in Action, says the government has to stop running up so much debt.

“These local guys, these commissioners and mayors, if they ran above their budget, they’d be tossed out of office,” he said.

McMillian, a former principal of Dalton High School, said he and some students in his adult education classes at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Ga., began talking about the national debt and other problems and looking for ways they could help solve them. They formed the group Taxpayers in Action several weeks ago.

They created a Web site (taxpayersinaction.org), and came up with a nine-point plan, which includes banning earmark spending, which legislators insert into bills with little oversight.

McMillian says the group’s current focus is on the first two parts of that plan: a law that would ban members of Congress from taking any money or other gifts from lobbyists and special interests and the creation of an independent agency to enforce that law.

The group is asking people to write letters to their senators and representatives backing these ideas.

“E-mails and telephone calls are easy, but if you sit down and write a letter, there’s a commitment there that they see. A letter is from a committed person,” he said.

McMillian says the group is also urging people to write letters to the editor in support of its plans. The group’s Web site even has sample letters written by group members that people can use to guide their own letters.

McMillian says both major political parties have helped get the nation into its current economic problems and voters will have to work outside the parties to help correct them.

“We believe partisanship is as much a part of the problem as anything. It keeps people from getting at the root of the problem. It’s fiscal irresponsibility more than any political party’s economic doctrine,” he said.

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