Seniors must get real on entitlements

To the editor:

It doesn’t surprise me one bit that most senior citizens would find fault with Robert Samuelson’s July 31 column, “It’s the elderly, stupid.” I use the word “most” because I know of at least one senior who would not.

Periodically, my father drives down to Las Vegas from Washington to visit my wife, his granddaughters and myself. He is 86, a World War II veteran who served on the USS California (after Pearl Harbor) and a person who is very concerned with the direction of this country.

During one of his more recent visits, he was into one of his more and more frequent railings at the TV news. Two pundits were debating the deficit, debt, tea party and entitlements. (My father supports the tea party.)

After the news was over, I asked my dad when the politicians first started raiding the Social Security trust fund why his generation didn’t rise up like the tea party and just flat tell those politicians to knock it off? He said, “Because we wanted it all. We wanted our Social Security and the big government spending. But that’s just my opinion.”

Maybe it’s his opinion. But it makes sense to me.

As a 48-year-old who has voted fiscally conservative all my voting years (starting at age 20), I am not counting one iota on Social Security or Medicare being there for me — unless some big changes are made. So my two questions for today’s seniors are:

1) Why did you continue to vote for the same politicians year after year, even though you knew they were raiding the trust fund?

2) As long as the changes don’t effect current recipients, why would you stand in the way of trying to fix things for my and my daughter’s generations?

Are you being selfish? Again?

Mark D. Traeger

Las Vegas

Economics lesson

To the editor:

Now that the tea party-led GOP has been granted nearly all of its demands with regard to the budget, what’s next for the economy? There will be no money to improve our rapidly decaying infrastructure, which will create no jobs. Because of the worsening employment picture, consumers are cutting back more on spending, leading to even higher unemployment.

Corporate America is unconcerned because they are making record profits from making and selling their products overseas and only having headquarters in the United States, where they pay little or no taxes.

The only accomplishment I see is that the GOP is succeeding in tanking the economy in order fulfill its priority of making Barack Obama a one-term president.

But where do we go from here? With less and less tax revenue there will be more and more cuts, resulting in an increasingly downward spiral.

With the current economic philosophy, I see no path to recovery. I sure hope we all wake up soon.

Michael Fox

Las Vegas

GOP shame

To the editor:

Thanks, Speaker John Boehner, for screwing up my country more than King George Bush II.

You were elected to do the bidding of the people, not to promote your own personal, selfish agenda. My country is now the financial laughingstock of the world. S&P has downgraded the credit worthiness of the United States to a level not seen since before World War I. All this was done because Rep. Boehner wanted to play a game called Tea Party Politics.

Well, he lost. So did more than 300 million others. All because he failed to do right for the country. Instead, he did it for his own personal self-aggrandizement. Shame on Mr. Boehner and shame on his Republican Party.

Dale Wood

Henderson

Sex selection

To the editor:

A commentary in the Aug. 4 Review-Journal concerning the practice of deliberately aborting female fetuses because a male child is desired fails to persuade on two major points (“In this brave new world, 160 million girls are ‘missing’ “).

First of all, the accepted practice in the United States is abortion on demand. A woman can get an abortion for any reason — or, more importantly, no reason at all. How in the world can anyone support unrestricted abortion for no reason here in the United States but become outraged when someone in another culture gets an abortion with a specific reason in mind?

Also, how can abortion for sex selection be defined as a “human rights abuse”? Who is the human that is being abused?

Can’t be the fetus, because if it’s defined as human then the abortion is murder. Can’t be the woman, because she can’t be forced to bear a child she doesn’t want.

The acceptance of widespread unrestricted abortion, like many other changes to traditional values, can result in significant unintended consequences. What we don’t need is another lame, poorly thought-out attempt at social engineering.

James Moldenhauer

North Las Vegas