To the editor:

When I listen to the TV and radio prognosticators talking about the need to cut the budget, I seldom hear anyone ask the conservatives why tax increases for the wealthiest are not a part of this discussion. We do have to cut the budget and we do need to redo our tax code, and if we are going to survive, we must ask the wealthiest to pay their fair share.

General Electric and several of the oil companies paid nothing and received billions in rebates. Try to imagine how this happened, or perhaps it would be simpler to ask Sam Brownback or Lynn Jenkins to explain it, because they and all our other Republican legislators are the puppets who make the laws that permit this outrage.

If we allow this to continue, the middle class will be destroyed. Our wages have not increased for 18 years while the wealthiest incomes have gone up 300 percent. What the greedy group at the top doesn’t seem to realize is that the middle class is the goose that laid the golden egg. The working people spending money to feed their kids and keep a roof over their head is the foundation of our capitalistic system.

Our existing economic woes are a direct result of Republican policies, and yet they continue to say that big business and only big business knows how to run this country, and that big government is the bad guy, the source of all our problems. What we seem to have forgotten is that government is us, government is our vote, our protection from the greed.