My compliments to Tim St. Clair for his article, "Rec field fees skyrocket," in the June 28 issue of the West Seattle Herald. As Dawn Longo, president of the Southwest Athletic Club points out, "I can't imagine why they (the Seattle School District, which owns the Southwest Recreation Complex where the Club's activities are located) want to put an athletic association at risk."

The reason is simple. Tax cuts. All across the United States our legislators have been yammering that taxes need to be cut because government has gotten too big. Government is too intrusive in our lives, telling us how to be educated, how to regulate factory effluent, how to keep our air and water clean, how our forests should or should not be logged, whether family planning should be financed, whether we should fulfill our obligations to our children and elderly. Grover Nordquist and his philosophy of "starving the beast" - the "beast" being government - ride roughshod over the public's welfare so that taxes can be cut with concomitant slashing of budgets. This handily provides an excuse to slash services.

The result of all this tax cutting is easy to see. There is no longer enough money to pay for anything that people expect from their government. We have moved away from being a society that believed that all services, whether you used them or not, were financed by all citizens. No longer do we share responsibilities. Since the advent of Reaganomics, and with the help of Nordquist and his friends, we have become a nation that insists on user fees. Today, we pay as we go. What was once made affordable by sharing responsibility has now become a profit point for privatization. In other words, there is no free lunch.

Some people may like this philosophy. If you have no children, why should you pay for schools? If you are not sick, why should you pay for health care? If you don't take the bus, why should you pay for public transportation? If you don't use athletic fields, why should you pay for them? And by extension, if you don't use police or fire services, don't pay for them either.

If you like this trend, then do nothing. On the other hand, if you have been supporting legislators who constantly advocate tax cuts with the phrase, "It's your money," and if you have seen your expenses for public services increase through the years, you ought to remember who is actually paying for all these tax cuts that seem so wonderful when you hear about them on television.

Peter Stekel

Alki