I read all the letters submitted to the Sunday Camera Open Forum with great sadness. We can all complain but there is no quick fix for the affordable housing, road building and other fiscal problems we face. The policies that led us here are 35 years in the making.

It was in the Reagan administration that less government began to be touted as the means to greater prosperity and, of course, the huge tax cuts to the highest tax brackets (from 70 percent to 28 percent — the largest tax cut in history). The concept of “trickle-down economics” which Reagan initiated has only worked to fill the pockets of the rich and in ever greater levels of greed and income inequality has rendered the middle class and even poorer folks unable to sustain themselves. “Less government” has also meant that public entities at all levels from city, county, state and nationally have received so little funding that they cannot maintain education, social services, law enforcement or even those traditional governmental functions such as road building and maintenance.

As I said, these are not problems that can be fixed overnight. It is high time, I think, to give the ideas of Bernie Sanders and others like him some serious thought. We need to make moves, enact laws to change the balance of income distribution by reducing the benefits accorded to such people as bankers, CEOs of large corporations and hedge-fund managers and enhancing the benefits to the rest of the population in this richest and most powerful country in the world.

Diane Baron

Boulder