I recently read a letter to the editor published Aug. 4 in a Boston newspaper about the trillion-dollar Iraq war, authored by a Richard Whiting of North Grafton, Mass. (No relation.)

It concluded as follows: “Funding the war through borrowing shifts the burden of paying for it onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. A war tax would ensure that our generation pays for it own mistakes.”

This Richard Whiting couldn’t have said it any better.

After the Minnesota bridge collapse, I heard on National Public Radio that our bridges need an investment of $9.2 billion per year for the next 20 years to protect the safety of our citizens. So, while this nation squanders its resources in Iraq – a place that had nothing to do with the 9/11 terrorists – and, in the process, ruining much of that country’s infrastructure, we are unable to take care of our own infrastructure here in America. All the while blithely cutting taxes so our children and grandchildren (except for those unnecessarily freed from estate taxes) will be sliding into a third-world status over the next century.

We need to get out of Iraq now, fix our infrastructure, fix our broken health care system, and charge the level of taxes necessary to pay for these things.

And elect people who will do those things.

The elections of 2008 cannot come soon enough.

Richard S. Whiting, Auburn