I see some folks are disappointed in our government. They want the smallest possible government and the least amount of taxes. Dream on, folks.

We have followed that road for the last 50 years and the promises reach a smaller radius of people every year. First, let us see how far "we the people" have come in our attempt to fulfill the role of consumer/taxpayer. First of all, our wives took it upon themselves to help out with a second paycheck. Many of us were satisfied with used cars. Many more worked overtime "partly because it paid better."

We paid our taxes without complaint even if we had to use credit cards to accomplish that feat. Most of us could not afford to send our children to college, but we did our best to find jobs for them so that education was not our of reach for them. Too many of us canceled our health insurance coverage as well.

To be truthful, we could have helped alleviate the labor problem if we all could have retired by age 65. By the way, at this point in the "recession" those of us with 401(k) accounts could be $2 trillion in the hole if something is not done to bring our economy back from the brink.

Now let us look at these complaints that spanned 150 years of our history and see what past presidents have done to alleviate those problems. President Abraham Lincoln denied his conservative Whig Party by pushing for more government involvement in business. He had our government building flatboats as they were called, to make deliveries down rivers to and from small businesses.

This brought profit back to business and work for the people. The strangest thing was he had campaigned like a "liberal" and still was elected by the Republican voters.

The next thing he did was have our government build railroad tracks back and forth across our country to deliver the resources of the west back east for industrial America. The intent was to support people by getting things done in a more timely fashion. With this as a start he ended up loaning big business the money to carry on building our present day infrastructure.

President Dwight Eisenhower did the same for the wealthy as he built a system of highways to Florida from New York. It was President Ronald Reagan who lied to us about "trickle down" economics and Jimmy Carter who allowed interest rates to climb in his attempt to save us as a people from going head over heels in debt just to survive.

As a matter of fact the "corporate structure" revealed this move as being foolhardy when in fact we the people needed a sharp cutting lesson in economics ourselves. Republican President Herbert Hoover allowed the stock market to crash and did nothing about it because it was a politically sensitive thing to do. FDR followed Lincoln's lead, and now you know the rest of the story.

Gene Rake, Columbus