(Note: I'm running for Town Council in Berkeley Heights, NJ this year. My website will have an online contribution system soon!)
By Stephen Yellin
In this era of economic hardship, it seems our nation's leaders have either forgotten - or simply despise - what the real deficit is in America today. Across our country, "austerity" is the order of the day. Social services are slashed, the rights of workers gutted, all women's rights to equality and autonomy stifled.
What these so-called "fiscal conservatives" - in Congress, state legislatures and even some in the White House - simply don't understand is that, even now, they are racking up a tremendous deficit in our country. That deficit was described so eloquently by Franklin Delano Roosevelt 75 years ago: "a deficit in the books of human fortitude".
Read on for FDR's thoughts and some additional ones of my own.