I'm watching George and George with Newt on ABC's This Week. Here is a strange comment by Wills, who I think is intelligent: the wealthy already pay 38 percent of the taxes, they shouldn't pay more taxes. Why not, they already own 80 percent of the wealth. Here is a new bumper sticker: "Sell it here build it here." We have deindustrialized the country, how about reindustrializing ?

Newt says if we tax the billionaires more, they will move their wealth off shore. Really? They have already done that. Look, the class war is over and the working poor have lost. While the upper class was busy "creating wealth" by stealing from the working poor around the world, our politicians were busy making previously illegal behavior legal.

Now the working poor are being blamed for the collapse of banks because they bought houses they couldn't afford. They could afford them before gas prices went to five dollars a gallon. This sounds like blaming the poor during the Hurricane Katrina for stealing food from a flooded Wal-Mart that couldn't be sold.

JAMES PINETTE

Caribou, ME

Okay, you got me, Jefferson Decker--what good laughs are to be had with you! Oh, to say that Frank is wholly blind to the good "government" tradition of conservatism--how apropos, in the pages of The Nation, no less! The good-government tradition of conservatism, now what the hell would that be? Should I have been reading The Weekly Standard, where your review could easily have fit, to get the lowdown on the "good-government" tradition of these fine mountebanks? And a pro-Reagan mention to boot --what a great feat for the neoliberals, Mr. Decker! I am so proud to have a subscription to The New Republic, I mean the Nation.dem, or whatever it is now--congratulations on your pro-Reagan, pro-conservative Pecksniffian bravery--might there be an undersecretaryship awaiting you in the Obama-Dick Lugar administration? Have fun!

Martin White

Salem, NY