Gordon Clay here. I attended the recent Tea Party at the Best Western in Harbor along with 165 other interested people.

There was a lot of rhetoric about reduced spending to achieve a smaller government but no proposals on what to do or cut or what the attendees were willing to give up.

It's easy to complain. It's much more difficult to come up with valid solutions.

Sue Gold, the organizer, closed the meeting giving us some ideas of what we could do.

• Contact our representatives.
• Educate ourselves.
• Work on campaigns for those candidates that represent your views.
• Sign up for the candidates screening committee.
• And donate money.

I'll take it a step further:

• Reject funds from stimulus packages that are directed to Curry County like the $2.7 million to help stem Sudden Oak Death Disease
• Cut relief for the wealthy whose tax rate has been reduced from 70% in the 70s to 35% currently. They're not the ones who have lost their jobs and homes.
• Eliminate subsidies to the gas, coal, and oil industries, and tobacco farmers.
• Require faith-based organizations to go back to providing charity services from their own pockets - true charity - instead of asking the government to fund their charity work.
• Cut funding of the Department of War (you may know it as the Department of Defense.)
• Notify Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid that you do not want to receive any money from these departments, ever.
• Timber, fishing and tourism are based on nature. Stop asking the government to prop them up. Now's the time to take control of our own economic future by developing it rather than wallowing in our past failures. As a city, county, state and nation.