Merry Christmas from the warmth of my car

To the editor:

I am a member of the class commonly known as “the workers.” We have a difficult time getting the attention of “the rulers” in between elections.

If this sounds like a plot line from “Les Miserables,” it is. Nothing ever changes. If you want to know how the movie really ends, you can Google “Marie Antoinette: fate of.”

While Sen. Harry Reid and President Barack Obama moonwalk along the edge of the fiscal cliff, there are millions of us outside the District of Columbia that are hanging on by our fingernails. We are one missed check away from living in our cars. We need an extension on our emergency unemployment benefits.

I realize that our leaders and the Washington lobbyists they play golf with probably don’t know any unemployed people. They have jobs for the next four years, and President Obama is living in some really nice government housing. So I’ll put this in terms they can understand.

It’s like an economic stimulus. You remember what an economic stimulus is, don’t you? Except that no one puts their unemployment checks in a tax-deferred, off-shore account. They use it to pay rent. They use it to pay the power bill.

You have stock in NV Energy, don’t you Sen. Reid? Don’t you want the stock price to remain strong? People who live in their cars don’t pay power bills. Haven’t you and your Wall Street friends picked up some great rental property through short sales? Don’t you want to keep those properties occupied? People who live in homeless shelters don’t pay rent. So do yourself and all of your million-dollar campaign contributors a favor. Pass an extension on the emergency unemployment benefits. That way, they can afford a few more feet on their next yacht, and the rest of us can afford to keep living indoors.

Is this a great country or what?

Deborah Woodbury

Las Vegas

It’s the spending

To the editor:

Several recent TV interviews with selected GOP congressmen revealed that these congressmen did not intend to honor their prior promises to oppose tax increases.

Both interviewers and congressmen didn’t bother to reveal that increasing tax rates over the last hundred years has solved no budget problem and never will.

The problem in Washington isn’t a shortage of tax money. It is the explosion in the amount of spending and borrowing. These eggheads refuse to address the cure by not addressing their spending and borrowing problem.

President Obama and his “total government” friends on both sides of the aisle are searching only for short-term solutions so they can hand the problem over to a new administration in four years. Presidents Bush, Clinton, Bush, Carter and Nixon, etc., all played the same game. All regardless of political affiliation, were international socialists. One Worlders, if you please, to the detriment of this great nation. All of them and their successors, have or will genuflect to the United Nations and give our tithing and the blood of our youth to that U.N. idol in New York City.

THOMAS F. JEFFERSON

ELKO

A new war?

To the editor:

Jerry Sturdivant’s Tuesday letter to the editor made some serious suggestions (“Repeal 2nd Amendment – and 4th, too”).

However his resume, which I assume was meant to establish some sort of expertise, actually fell far short of doing so. I’m familiar with many who have “been in the military, been a policeman and carried a firearm for 40 years” who have a much more reasonable outlook on society than Mr. Sturdivant.

It should be noted just how successful Mr. Sturdivant’s colleagues, employing the same mind-set, have been over the past decades in their war on drugs. A new “war on guns” would really be something to watch.

I would suggest that if Mr. Sturdivant is serious about giving up his guns, he should carry them down to the local police station and leave them there.

I’m reminded of an old Yiddish proverb: “Enter the room and be thought a fool; start talking and remove all doubt.”

William Boyd

Mesquite