To understand the root causes of today’s high interest rates, we need to look back into the murky beginnings of today’s current universe. For Americans, that means going back about two years.

At that time, in an effort to promote the apparently never-ending “recovery,” interest rates were at zero percent. Because of this, certain OPEC countries decided that they no longer wanted to be paid with dollars. They wanted to be paid in euros. That, not the need to “fight inflation,” was the real reason interest rates started rising.

Now that the nearly worthless greenback has some backing, interest rates will hopefully stop going up. Trouble is, by raising interest rates, the Fed has created inflation, felt especially by those who borrow money for business or have an adjustable mortgage rate. This would seem to indicate that more rate increases are on the horizon.

I think that most people would agree that raising rates any further would create more problems then it would solve.

In the end, there seems to be only one way out of this dilemma: curtail and cut the growth and size of government.

Andy Bennett, Buckfield