We have bigger problems than cigarettes
“This is America, and we have the right to smoke wherever we choose! However, smokers’ rights do not extend over to my lungs.”
And your exhaust pipe does not have the right to extend over to my lungs either, but it does, doesn’t it?
If you like to see the real effects of the exhaust pipe, simply go to grammar school at recess and watch our future generation dealing with asthma by sucking on an inhaler to get their lungs to function while they exercise at the playground.
Now there’s a real problem to deal with!
Robert Willis
Redding, Calif.
Bush’s social security overhaul is based on lies
Where do you begin when an opinion piece begins with a blatant falsehood and solemnly intones “that’s a fact,” as Eladio Bobadilla did in the Feb. 24 Renegade Rip?
Well, maybe with the “true facts.”
True fact: Social Security is not going to “go broke soon” by any measure. President Bush is simply lying about that. Every year, the Social Security trustees push back the exhaustion date for the Social
Security Trust Fund. They’ll likely do so again this month in the 2005 report, if they don’t fudge the facts. Even then the system will be better funded than the Department of Defense, which is technically broke right now.
True fact: George W. Bush does not want to save Social Security. Bush has not advanced any proposal that would make the system more stable or better in any measurable way. He now admits privatization won’t fix the system’s current problems. Although his scheme is quite deliberately murky, he apparently wants to borrow $2 trillion and carve out $40 billion immediately for Wall Street brokerage fees. Yet another boost for his “birth tax,” the money Bush is asking generations yet unborn to pay with no net benefit.
True fact: Social Security has already been “fixed.” It was fixed back in the 1980s, when the regressive payroll tax was increased as part of a deal to address the structural problems in the system. That deal raised taxes for the past 20 years, and now Bush wants to swindle those who faithfully paid in. Why? Because he’s run the federal budget into an iceberg with tax giveaways for people who didn’t need it and wars that have cost us 50,000 casualties and billions of dollars so far. That’s where Bush put the money he stole from Social Security. And he’s as much as told us he ain’t paying us back.
True fact: For Bush’s “plan” to work, you have to assume that the U.S. economy will do so well over the next four decades that Social Security won’t need any help anyway. You literally have to assume that everyone who invests in the stock market will do better than average. I fear Bush, like Bobadilla, has no trouble believing that’s possible. But he’s already demonstrated his grasp of basic math.
True fact: Everywhere privatization of public retirement has been tried, it has been at best no improvement (Great Britain) and at worst a disaster (Chile.) At least 75 percent of those participating in the British private investment account program will not have enough to retire with adequate pensions, according to the British Pensions Commission.
True fact: The Bush Administration and its paid assistants in the press have no trouble lying about the current situation and their plans. They take quotes out of context, change yardsticks in mid-measurement and flip-flop on the very existence of the trust fund when it serves their ends. These are not honest people.
True fact: There is a crisis regarding Social Security and George W. Bush has only a limited time to address it. That crisis is that the American people may be starting to wise up after decades of concentrated lying on his part. Only about a third of the public supports his scheme now. That number dwindles the more they learn about it. If he’s going to destroy Social Security, Bush is going to have to lie harder and more shamefully than he ever has before, even counting his Weapons of Mass Destruction whoppers.
Fortunately, for him that’s a no-brainer.
Christopher Leithiser
BC staff
Marijuana use is Biblically acceptable
It is important for cannabis users to know where they stand on the cannabis issue in Biblical terms. It is Biblically correct to re-legalize cannabis (Kaneh Bosm, before the King James Bible).
It is no accident that the Bible indicates God created all the seed-bearing plants and said they were all good, on literally the very first page in Genesis 1:11-12 and 29-30. The only Biblical restriction placed on cannabis is that we use it with thanksgiving – see 1 Timothy 4:1-5, where it even describes who will promote its prohibition as those who have fallen away from the faith.
Many people would also like clergy to speak up on this issue since Jesus Christ risked going to jail in order to heal the sick.
Stan White
Dillon, Colo.