By DAVE HAMRICK

Editor-at-Large

When I started my adult life, seems like just a year or two ago, it wasn't the best of times.

Vietnam was going on, and then all of a sudden it was over and tens of thousands of angry, disillusioned soldiers came home to an angry, disillusioned nation. Gas prices shot up, inflation set in, and the economy went south.

Between taxes and inflation, folks like yours truly were being eaten alive. Every time I got a small pay raise, Uncle Sam was there for his piece of it, and in one case my pay actually went down after a teeny raise bumped me into a higher bracket.

After studying the situation, it seemed obvious to me — still does — that the size of the federal debt and the speed at which it was increasing was hurting the country — hurting me. Interest rates were so high that a young struggling family like mine couldn't hope to own a home, and the heavy demand placed on the money market by the federal government was a big factor.

Early on, I took comfort in the political debate of the day. In this state, we elected people who were conservative, who promised to go to Washington and get spending under control... not to throw out the baby with the bath water, but definitely to throw out the bath water.

At that time, a Republican in the Georgia delegation was a rare thing. In fact, the entire Southeast was solidly in the Democratic Party (though we often voted for Republicans for president and vice president). But they were conservative Democrats, and in fact the majority in the Democratic Party were conservative in that they believed in a balanced budget and reasonable taxation.

I tried to vote for folks who sounded reasonable... who wanted to do good things in Washington but who understood that all those good things have to be paid for.

But a funny thing kept happening. We kept sending folks to Washington to balance the budget, and the budget kept getting more and more unbalanced.

Finally, we sent one of our own to occupy the White House. Jimmy Carter had looked us squarely in the eye and promised to balance the budget in four years. I couldn't believe it was possible. The debt had gotten pretty far out of whack by then and I figured it would take ten years or longer, but I sure wasn't going to let a chance like that pass by. With a conservative majority in Congress and a conservative in the White House, I felt we had a really good chance to get things straightened out.

Bitter disappointment. I believe Carter tried, and I believe he could have done it but for one problem: While the majority of the country and the majority in Congress wanted a balanced budget and lower taxes so that people like me would have a better chance at making ends meet, the leadership of the Democratic Party did not.

I finally figured out that the leadership of the majority party has a lot of power, especially with the size majority that Democrats had in those days, and the young, eager Democrats that we Georgians were sending to Congress were finding that they carried the leadership's water or they didn't get the committee positions they wanted, and their bills didn't get to the floor, and the big spending projects went to other states.

How do the leaders get to be the leaders? You do me a favor, and I do you a favor. We all do each other enough favors, and eventually somebody gets big enough to do a favor for the speaker of the House, gets noticed and gets a key committee assignment, a vice chairmanship, a chairmanship.

The point is that you climb the ladder by spending money, not saving it.

I listened to congressman after congressman come home after a year or two and try to explain what had happened to those promises to balance the budget and reduce spending and cut taxes, and it became clear that we would never see a balanced budget as long as Democrats controlled Congress.

That's not because Democrats were evil. It's because they wanted to do good things for the poor, the environment, etc., and they built a constituency of poor folks, environmental activists and others who wouldn't reelect them unless they pushed spending past the point of reason. Add the pork barrel to that, along with the occasional war and the inevitable corruption, and you've got a wildfire out of control.

The answer, of course, is to return to a smaller government that controls less of the economy, i.e. a less socialistic government. Then we can lower taxes so people don't spend half of their lives slaving for the government, and everyone will benefit — poor, rich and the rest of us in the middle.

The basic moral belief behind my political philosophy is simple: people have a right to keep most of what they earn through their labors and their ingenuity. And a government that takes more than half of the average person's income in taxes is not a government of the people, by the people and for the people.

Help the poor get educations and find jobs and become productive citizens? Absolutely. Provide a strong defense and regulate interstate business so that everyone has a fair chance? Definitely.

As long as you establish a reasonable, low taxation rate and amend the Constitution to forbid borrowing our children's income to pay for today's programs, there is much good that we can do as a nation.

Anything more, and we've become an authoritarian, socialist nation and our dreams of individual freedom are out the window.

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