Letters to the editor, July 22, 2009

Health care Obama-style

(President Barack) Obama has pointedly stated he wants to bring Europe’s health care system to the United States. This in effect would reduce health care costs for seniors by increasing the mortality rate.
England experiences 15,000 seniors dying prematurely from cancer annually. These lives could have been saved if the health care system would have permitted early diagnosis and treatment.
America projects 300,000 premature cancer deaths for seniors annually if we adopt their health care system.
The public health care plan in Congress today reduces Medicare benefits, thus requiring increased supplemental insurance at higher premiums and increased taxes to pay for the public heath care.
There is ample coverage for illegal immigrants and those seeking abortion, but seniors get the death sentence with higher mortality rates and substantially less care. Individuals’ health care costs increase to pay for the medical welfare system for the uninsured.
Redistributing the wealth through socialism is the change this president advocates.
Obama’s policies don’t pass the stomach and nose test and are a highly destructive force in our future. Wake up and take your country back before all freedoms are gone.
D. Albright
Sequim

Why teens act the way they do

One of my pet peeves recently has been Sequim high school kids stopping traffic to cross Sequim Avenue in the middle of the block, out of a crosswalk. This makes cars stop many times as opposed to just at crosswalk locations.
Respect for the law and for the rights of others does not appear to exist during the school year when the bell rings. In the scheme of things, I guess this is not a big deal.
What I saw today was a big deal. Two teachers were leading what appeared to be a future first-grade class across Sequim Avenue to catch a bus.
Naturally, they stopped traffic to do so, which would have been acceptable except the crosswalk was 30 yards away to the south. So, instead of taking the opportunity to teach young children respect for all laws  by giving a short lecture on crosswalks and why they are important, the two teachers involved got lazy, held up traffic and succeeded in teaching the kids not to respect the law.
Now I understand why Sequim high school students act the way they do at quitting time.
Toney Allen
Sequim

Who buys votes, who pays?

As someone who collected over 60 signatures to get I-1033 on the November ballot, I must respond to the opinions espoused by the Washington State Budget & Policy Center in the Guest Opinion column July 15, 2009.
With due respect to Remy Trupin, their executive director, I heard all of the same arguments in California in 1978 against Proposition 13, the Jarvis Amendment.
The same kinds of groups protesting then are now
opposing I-1033. The WEA (teachers’ union), Washington State Service Employees International Union and Washington Council of County & City Employees, all groups whose members would benefit from continued profligate spending of property and sales taxes, are representative of those. I imagine that Trupin’s center could also fit that category.
Fortunately for millions of property owners in California, Proposition 13 passed, their homes were saved, and the state prospered for almost 30 years.  
Contrary to naysayers, including most media, unions and politicians, the state led the nation in economic growth and became the fifth-largest economy in the world.
Recent financial problems in California are not caused by Proposition 13 because property valuations under that law are recycled to current market value whenever a property is sold and virtually all properties there have been sold several times during that period.
California’s problem — as it will be in Washington unless I-1033 is passed or the constitution amended — is caused by liberal politicians buying votes with other people’s money and resisting any limits on government’s ability to take as much as they want from taxpayers.   
Don Boensel
Sequim

Livability is within reach

Three cheers to Jim Casey and the Gazette for his editorial (July 15, 2009) on building Sequim up rather than out. 
The time has come to make more efficient use of our limited downtown space. The city of Sequim should be doing everything in its power to both use and encourage a higher density downtown.
A new city hall could use its first floor parking for covered farmers’ market spaces for local food vendors in the off-
season on weekends.
I, for one, would love to live in an apartment across the street from the Fortune Star Restaurant where I could eat every lunch.
Think of it, first-floor retail, second- and perhaps third-floor apartments and a community garden on the roof. How much more livable a community could we have, and it’s within reach now.
It’s a modified cliché, but remember, if you build it, we will come and we will love it.
Bob and Elaine Caldwell
Sequim

A fighting chance for Michael and for us

The king of pop is dead and it would appear his doctor helped kill him.
Michael Jackson had problems to be sure. His addiction to a variety of drugs seems to be well established. He also had huge challenges facing him as he tried to prepare for a final world tour that he hoped would erase mountains of debt. His undoing was a doctor who was willing to prescribe, in increasing quantities, the very drugs that were killing him.
Sadly, his life and death sounds eerily like our economy.
We have been addicted at both a personal and national level to the drugs of debt and expanding government for decades. Ultimately, it has brought us to a crisis point. The “cure” being offered by our politicians is nothing more than super-doses of the very drug that is killing us — trillions and trillions of dollars of debt plus government interventions that threaten to strangle everything from autos to health care.
If Michael Jackson’s doctor had acted responsibly, Michael still would have had a mountain of trouble. However, he would also still be alive with a fighting chance to climb that mountain.
Stopping the craziness of so-called “economic stimulus” and massive government expansion won’t fix all our problems, but it will at the very least give us a fighting chance.
Tim Richards
Sequim