All this fear-mongering over socialized medicine and taxes. I hate to burst the conservative bubble, but progressive tax was around long before Karl Marx. It has been with us as long as the many have allowed themselves to be controlled by the few.
The more one had, the more the few at the top expected you to give them. And the few at the top have always had ways of not paying their share. As it is today. The transfer of wealth via taxes is the name of the game.
I would have no problem paying taxes if I knew our infrastructure was being maintained and there were no homeless, hungry or untreated sick people. Instead, we pay taxes to help war profiteers gain more power. We are paying for our own destruction and enslavement.
The only reason to have a government is to do those things that are better done collectively than individually. This includes having a society with no homeless, hungry or untreated sick people.
Corporate bailouts, subsidies and war profiteers are by far the largest drains on our economy. We are paying billions to war profiteers for doing things the military used to do more cheaply and efficiently. The rich are sucking the life out of our economy. Not the poor.
If you don’t have a problem with war profiteers, but you do have a problem with socialized medicine, you are contributing to the downfall of America.
ARLEN CUSTER
Durham
Deceit and lies
The rumors of government-run death panels in health-care legislation are so wildly unfounded that they subvert valid public debate over reform. I have people with disabilities, like cerebral palsy and Down’s Syndrome, in my family. From my conviction that each of these lives is a gift, I oppose elective abortions and embryonic stem cell research as infringements on human life.
So I’m also very attentive to historical echoes of the Nazi Aktion T4 program to euthanize the disabled. But I dispute and resent the dishonest invocation of Aktion T4 by reform opponents. They have fabricated entirely false portrayals of health care legislation subsidizing and requiring euthanasia of the elderly, building the same irrational kind of paranoia that falsely asserts the CIA or Israel planned the 9/11 attacks.
The actual legislative provision that they distort beyond recognition simply covers, as a benefit, consultation with physicians about care at the end of one’s life. This is the kind of information that I and my parents have used to prepare living wills for ourselves specifying what measures should and should not be used to sustain our lives under certain circumstances.
I’d wager that some of the proponents of the death-panel lie have themselves prepared living wills in consultation with their doctors and family members, to make their wishes clear and spare their families confusion and painful choices. Their hypocritical scare-mongering deepens the immorality of their campaign. This sort of deceit demeans real debate and betrays the spirit of democracy.
SPENCER BRADFORD
Durham
