Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders says middle-class taxpayers did not cause the financial mess on Wall Street, and should not be required to pay for it. He proposes that a 10 percent surtax on people earning $500,000 a year — $1 million for couples — should be put in place for five years to cover the cost of the bailout, and is floating a petition in support of that proposal. It works for me!

Under President Eisenhower the richest among us were taxed at 90 percent of the top end of their incomes, and corporations at 52 percent, and against Republican pressure, Ike refused to support lowering those rates. As I recall, there was also something back then called a “luxury tax.” Yet, as the older among us remember, the Ike years are remembered nostalgically as the golden “good” years of our nation.

The top tax rate for the rich remained high until Reagan came into office and lowered it to 28 percent from 78 percent. That was when the government began amassing huge deficits.

Clinton did what had been considered impossible by many— took us from deficits to a surplus situation, which was totally decimated by Bush’s tax cuts and wars. Former Republican Sen. Marlow Cook of Kentucky voted for Kerry in 2004 because “Lyndon Johnson said we could have guns and butter at the same time. This administration [sic. And John McCain] says we can have guns, butter, and no taxes … God help us if we are not smart enough to know that is not true and we live by it at our peril.”

Five years ago the richest 1 percent owned 37 percent of this country’s wealth. It now owns 57 percent. If the bailout is passed it will own two-thirds. But this delusional administration, with its simplistic views of war and with the financial crisis brought about by Wall Street’s greed and short-term thinking, still believes making the rich richer is the answer to everything.

Yet many of the materialistic rich claim to be Christian. Jesus said, “Build up no treasures here on earth,” and he told the rich young man to “Sell all you have and give the money to the poor.” By those guidelines, taxing the rich as Eisenhower did, would help those people in their quests to be good Christians.

During World War II Gen. Eisenhower wrote about taxes in a letter to Mamie: “I like to pay what the government thinks I owe them.” That was probably the last time a Republican ever wrote or said anything positive about taxes. Eisenhower, by the way, would have been violently against the Iraq War. His son, Gen. John Eisenhower, voted for Kerry in 2004 for that reason. Ike, who warned against the influence of the military-industrial complex on policy, would have been outraged that the vice president’s former company is the war’s largest beneficiary. He mourned for the schools and hospitals that could have been built with money the government was instead spending on bombs.

Read his farewell address.

Lonna Gooden Van Horn

Northwood, Iowa