Ronald Reagan

There are those of us who still find it immensely offensive that an airport just outside Washington, DC was renamed in "honor" of the man who fired all of the air traffic controllers. The damage he did to the U.S. in general is galling enough, but it's a real stab in the eye to rename a major airport for him.

OK, I rarely fly - and since the Bush/Ashcroft restrictions have taken hold I've sworn off flight altogether - and I have no love for unions of any kind. Nevertheless, on the rare occasions that I do fly I plan my trips to stay away from the "Reagan" airport. Sure, that airport is already overused; a significant delay is usually involved when your flight passes through there. But that isn't why I avoid it; I've taken flights that cost more and took longer simply to avoid that errantly renamed terminal.

How many of you remember Reagan's "Morning in America?" I do. It didn't look like morning to me, but then I was just a simple blue-collar guy at the time. I didn't benefit from Reagan's so-called "benefits."

George W. Bush makes Reagan look like a liberal. Since the Reagan era, I've moved on up in the working world; I left the blue-collar thing behind shortly into G.H.W. Bush's first and only term. It wasn't until Clinton was in office that things really got better for me and my family, though.

There is much more to "doing well" than taxes. I saw no perceptible benefit from the Reagan tax cuts; after all, the combined income of my wife and myself was less than $30K. We didn't earn enough to fall into the "benefit zone." We even had to take out a loan in order to pay our Federal taxes one year.

Since W has been in office, I've paid more in *real* taxes than I ever did under Clinton. Federal taxes are only a fraction of what we really pay.