Open your eyes to Democrat fantasyland

Tuesday, April 23, 1996

Republican Party’s fiscal plan is headed in the right direction
for AmericaBy Mike Cooper

After reading Darrin Hurwitz’s April 22 viewpoint, "Republican
leader misleading," the first question that came to my mind was,
"How much did the California Democratic Party pay him to have his
ranting printed?"

While pounding Republicans for taking advantage of issues that
divided the voters, he has conveniently forgotten about some of his
party’s own divide-and-conquer tactics, like labeling all
pro-lifers as right-wing extremists and pitting rich against
poor.

The only difference between these tactics, used by Slick Willie
in 1992 and those the Republicans are using now is that the
Republican issues of ending race and gender preferences, outlawing
the barbaric partial birth abortion and cutting the growth of the
federal government are supported by a majority of the American
people. I know I don’t speak for the majority of UCLA students, but
I can say with a high level of certainty that I do speak for the
majority of Californians and Americans when I say that Washington
has become a beast which has to be brought under control.

Hurwitz is living in a fantasy world if he believes that
students should be entitled to have their education paid for by the
feds. If he wants to know why Republicans want students to pay the
interest on their loans like all other Americans, or why they think
funding education should be a state responsibility, here are the
answers:

Washington doesn’t have the money (thanks to the Democratic
Congress in the 1980s), and federal bureaucrats have proven
themselves incompetent when it comes to administering such
programs. For your information, this is why the American people
were overwhelmingly against Hillary Clinton’s socialized health
care plan once they found out the details.

I’m sure that most college students, selfish as they are, would
like nothing more than to have their entire education subsidized by
Uncle Sam. However, I can guarantee you that when they’re out in
the real world with a real job, they’ll be very pissed off when
they see that all these wonderful government programs will result
in an average tax rate upwards of 75 percent (one of the
Congressional Budget Office’s predictions for the decades to
come).

Not only that, but if the federal government were to gain as
much control over education as Clinton would like (in reference to
Goals 2000), I’m sure most parents would want to send their
children to private schools whether they could afford it or not.
For the last couple of centuries, our educational system has done
just fine with parents having far more control over their
children’s education than some bureaucrat 3,000 miles away. Look
where federal intervention has gotten us.

I spoke with Phillip Carter of the Daily Bruin a few days ago
regarding his interview with John Peschong of the Republican Party
("Taking California by storm of ideas," April 18), and he informed
me that The Bruin was trying to bring some balance into campus
political debate.

It’s obvious that Hurwitz, who expects the campus to be racially
diverse but uniformly liberal, can’t take the heat from major
opposing viewpoints. If he could, he wouldn’t resort to
categorizing all conservatives as "extreme right wing," a phrase
frequently used to describe Timothy McVeigh. How would he like it
if I lumped all liberals in with that left-wing wacko known as the
Unabomber?

Cooper is a fourth-year economics student and secretary of Bruin
Republicans.