Guest View: Facts in Lantz opinion piece favor the left

By Robert Bernosky
I have to admit, when I first read the letter from Karen and Tom Lantz, I checked their voter registration because I thought it was a belated April Fool’s Day prank by a fellow Republican. Not because of the content, but the “vitriolic” style in which it was written. We the people, city, county, state, and country need honest debate, not schoolyard bullying.
What is lost on the Lantzes is that no elected leader, no candidate, no political party is ever going to get it right 100% of the time. Both sides have their share of idiotic quotes by their politicians, but cherry picking facts and circumstances to turn any one of those bodies into something less than honorable is just mean and disingenuous. Running and holding for office is honorable, as is being published in a newspaper. Let’s not waste the effort being ugly.
Addressing the letter’s headline, if junior went to college, he may not get a good job because he chose the wrong major. Since April 1, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services received 85,000 H-1B applications, maxing out the number Congress has allocated for this year. U.S. businesses use those visas to hire scientists, engineers, programmers, advertisers, bankers, and other high-knowledge jobs. As a career CFO in many industries, I can vouch that a company would much rather hire from inside the country than go through the time, expense, and hassle of the H-1B program. If we don’t have enough people with the right qualifications within, businesses are going to go where they must in order to get the skills they need to compete.
For those seeking non-college major type jobs, we need the economy to grow. The best way to do that is to spawn innovation by our engineers, scientists, and software programmers. A great deal of those types start companies that hire a lot of people that buy cars, homes, daycare, and lattes. But higher education has been made so expensive, what is the Berkeley or MIT graduate supposed to do when they graduate with over $100,000 of debt? Join a start-up that has tremendous upside potential but pays less and has risk of failure, or take a safe job that does not lead to the next great things being invented but allows them to definitely address their student loan?
The practice of laying off teachers is bad. But what the Lantzes omit is that while a great number of teachers do get laid off, the vast majority of those teachers get rehired for the next school year. It is a horrible cycle that we need to work on for the teachers and their families, but in California it is more the fault of the state legislature than anyone else.
As they point out, cutting public jobs or not hiring for them does indeed hurt the economy, but the liabilities of those past and present public employees relating to their pensions and healthcare is causing a dramatic shift of monies from being spent on services performed today to paying for services that were performed in the past. The Lantzes would better serve your readers if they studied over how that occurred and reported their findings.
Another omitted fact of the Lantzes: The Prop. 30 tax increase that passed because it was for education? Virtually all of it is going toward pensions. Ask any teacher in the Hollister School District if they are teaching (being paid for) any more days since Prop. 30 passed. I have, and the answer is “no.”
Elected leaders make choices. Are they going to cut government assistance or decrease use of Air Force One? Are they going to stop funding of robotic squirrels to save food stamps for families that need food on their table? Are the elected officials going to take an honest look at departmental budgets and figure out where it is most sensible to cut or what will get the most press? Whose idea was sequestration anyway? Answer: it was not the Republicans. Even more important choices: Are elected leaders going to kill industries with over-the-top ecology. That’s what is happening right in our backyard. Whether it is water being diverted, oyster beds being turned into marine sanctuaries, or dairies being made uncompetitive by regulation, we are killing off jobs and tax revenue every single day. It is not Republicans leading that effort.
If nothing else, I want to make this clear: Republicans want everyone to have more money to spend and they think that the best person to make that decision on how to spend your money is you. That is why we like smaller government. A smaller government costs less and means that you have more money to spend yourself, how you choose.
The Lantzes attack and name calling of Republicans is not warranted, or if they are going to, they need to look at their own party (they are registered Democrats) and criticize and attack it equally. The Lantzes need to accept that fact that there are ebbs and flows of political ideology, but Republicans are not the party in control right now, and have not been for quite a while. They control the House of Representatives, but not the Senate and not the White House. In California, the Republicans control neither the legislature nor the governor’s mansion.
Robert Bernosky is chairman of the San Benito County Republican Party.