Despite promising to better the lives of Americans through tax reforms and military adventurism, the legislators responsible have in fact made life in America less comfortable for the majority of us.

They have committed more than $14 trillion in debt spending to these initiatives since 2002,  leaving us with little to show for it. The fact that the tax cuts did not pay for themselves — by increasing tax revenues that would have offset this spending — is all the proof one needs to label them a failure. And the fact that the Middle East continues to experience turmoil that occasionally disrupts life in the west is evidence that those ventures didn’t deliver the peace of mind promised either.

Disagreements over the path we should follow from here spark violence these days. I don’t think any of us would have guessed that would lead a mob to attack our Capitol 20 years ago, but today some of us are hardly surprised by it. Clearly this came about because our leaders stopped believing in the ability of compromise to move us forward. The question is, how do we restore their faith in it?

Jamie Beaulieu, Farmington