When will we face reality? Maybe never if we continue to be duped by those who have more power to control our economy and our tax system. Our own 34th District senator states that "Washington state has some 503 tax breaks on the books representing around $13.6 billion a year of lost revenue to the state."

I tried to research the corporations that get these tax breaks and was told by one state agency that this was private tax information. It is time it was public knowledge and it is time that it was stopped.

Now add to this the inane incarceration of thousands of people because we have decided to place a prohibition on certain selected substances - not alcohol which is probably the greatest substance evil of them all. I thought we had learned our lesson about curbing access to alcohol but no - we just substituted marijuana and a few other drugs and are now paying a big price for this prohibition.

According to author Sam Harris murderers, rapists and child molesters have regularly been paroled to make room for these drug law violators. The cost to the public to carry on this selective drug prohibition is $100 billion dollars each year as it consumes 50 percent of our court time and the energy and time of over 400,000 police officers.

While this fiasco in tax waste is happening there are armed services personnel, some gravely wounded and handicapped for life, who have little funding. We do not provide enough jobs that pay a living wage. We have not provided affordable housing or healthcare for all our citizens. We do not fund early childhood education that is taken for-granted in other western nations such as Norway.

If every citizen in this country knew the truth about tax inequity, there would be a citizen movement to stop all this greed and misuse of our tax money. But with three corporations controlling the majority of all the media we have been so brain washed that many of us seem to have lost our initiative to speak out.

Will the next generation step up to change this system of rewarding the rich and overly taxing the middle class? Hopefully, there will be leadership arising to bring together all those who want to stop the warmongering, the tax gouging of ordinary folks, and reduce the unleashed power of the corporation.

We once bad-mouthed unions when those who controlled unions got greedy and omnipotent. But unions are necessary to the well being of workers who need to negotiate decent wages and working conditions. Likewise, corporations are not necessarily evil but legislation over the years has allowed corporations to have all the rights of persons under the law without responsibilities to society. This is wrong.

It is up to us citizens to be well informed and not be afraid to help make changes in our tax system or in the laws we chose to pass. After all, our government was created to be of the people, by the people and for the people. Let's bring it back again to what we said we wanted it to be.

Georgie Bright Kunkel is a freelance writer and speaker on aging, humor, WWII and the Holocaust. Contact her at gnkunkel@comcast.net or 935-8663.