The Day editorial, Jan. 6, "Mr. President, time for bold leadership," agreed with Republican's assertion that U.S. problems are all about money. Not reality.

When Republicans were in power, Vice President Cheney famously said deficits didn't matter. Since the Clinton economy was good, we were headed for surpluses. But then we embarked on two wars without paying for them, the Bush tax cuts exceeded the cost of those two wars, drug legislation gave huge breaks to pharma, after 9/11 we created a bloated homeland security bureaucracy, the economy went into a downward spiral, and maybe worst of all, we experienced huge climate disasters, sure to increase in the future.

Even though money is not a good measure of our well being, Republicans are using it for extortion. We are not dealing with real challenges.

Our dysfunctional institutions do not deal with slowly developing threats: peak oil; glacier melt; droughts; rising sea levels; violent storms; overpopulation; and income inequality. We are headed for resource wars, food shortages, violent unrest, mass migrations, and the likely mother of all market crashes, climate collapse.

Many species are going extinct, next could be us.

Republicans are largely to blame. They will do one thing for us though, they will be sure we are well armed.