The Placer County Board of Supervisors has approved hiring a lobbyist to go to Washington to try to bring in funds for the county’s budget problems.

Why does the county need a lobbyist when we have an elected representa-tive who can take action to address the issues of the county and dis-trict? Mr. McClintock, who appears to only say “no” to everything, seems to be more interested in trashing the efforts of Congress and the President. He could be our Representative McClintock, but he isn’t. He doesn’t offer an alternative plan except for more tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, which was the rallying cry of the past years, resulting in the current economic disaster.

How can we measure the failure of the policies of the past eight years? There are many ways, but let’s check some numbers that are found in the U.S. Census data banks as well as analyses by researchers: in 1980, the richest 1 percent of Americans took home about 9 percent of total na-tional income. Since then, income has been redistributed and by 2007, the richest 1 percent took home 22 percent of total national income. Now if anyone reading who is in that top 1 percent or plans to be there soon, this is good news indeed. For all the rest of us this is fail-ure.

So Mr. McClintock is sitting back, drawing a nice salary, getting great health care, sending out ridiculous mailings on our tax dollars, and saying “no” to everything. Where is the effort for our district? There is none, but I’m sure he’s planning on getting re-elected. I think we need to replace him; it’s just not soon enough to help now.

PF Pen Watson,

Colfax