Where’s Ralph Nichols? Only he could add proper perspective to the article, “Tukwila teacher active in Occupy movement” in your last edition.

I congratulate teacher Mr. Escamilla for wanting to see, first hand, events that are shaping the attention of the public as the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement has done.

However, I take exception to his views that government’s role is to create jobs, and that funding should not be cut for social services. If Mr. Escamilla’s intention is to teach his students something about the “economy and the lack of quality jobs,” he should be turning his ire to both federal and state governments, instead of looking for more handouts to justify some notion of social injustice.

I am tired of people wanting more from government. Whatever happened to self-reliance and hard work. The founding work ethic of this once great nation and the cornerstone of Liberty.

Wanting more from government is the reason our nation faces a $15 trillion debt (equivalent to 100 percent of GDP.) and our state faces a $2 billion deficit.

And it isn’t due to a lack of spending, because spending in this sate has increased since 2005 from $60 billion to a projected $72 billion in the next biennium, all during the down-turned economy.

Rather our continued government indebtedness is due to a lack of managing its reduced revenues, and a penchant by government to overtax and over-regulate, which has forced jobs overseas. Every dollar taken from the private sector for government’s use reduces the private sector’s effectiveness in jobs creation and competitiveness. Just ask an economist.

And although the supposed “grass-roots” intent of the OWS movement was to expose the greed of Wall Street and its gluttonous siphoning of taxpayers bailouts, it has been co-opted by “Big labor’ groups as the Strong Economy for All Coalition (SEIU), the AFL-CIO, the Washington state employees agent, e.g. “Working Washington and a host of anti-capitalists and tax-funded community organizations, which are attempting to bankrupt this nation.

The real social injustice here is that working Americans and the 50 percent who pay the taxes to run government are the people sabotaged by groups wanting more from the government.

Fred Novota
Burien