Let billionaires come to the rescue

I saw an article recently where Bill Gates said he would be happy to pay a lot more money in taxes.

The fact is that we have a lot of people today who have far more money than they know what to do with. And I’m happy for them. I wish we had a lot more people like that. But taxing them more will not help anybody in the long run. The more money that government has, the more they spend. Government debt will still grow no matter how much the billionaires pay in taxes.

And governments, at least at state and federal levels, do not know how to manage money. They spend too much, waste too much, never cut a bad or no-longer-needed program, too much money ends up in the wrong hands. A privately-run program will run more efficiently with less potential for corruption.

So I have a proposal. We privatize what otherwise might be a government program. We should invite these billionaires to Washington, one at a time or all together. We ask or challenge them to take up a cause. One thing that comes to mind is scholarships for poor people and/or scholarships for medical schools. There can be government programs that we let them take control of. Government employees would become private sector ones.

There are a lot of government programs that we can and should try to farm out to the private sector, namely, the very wealthy. We have an untapped resource (billionaires) whose help we need. We should do something here.

Larry Craig

Wilmette