Congress thinks we need to cut Social Security benefits to drop the national debt, and plans on doing so. This was on CNN news June 17.

How about we cut aid to foreign countries, and the president’s travel expenses, and all the other wasted spending before we put 50 million seniors in their kids’ homes, or out on the streets?

Additional Photos

An opponent of changes to Social Security demonstrates at a National Council on Aging meeting in Philadelphia in 2005. The Associated Press

If you are young and don’t care, please ask yourself if you want your grandparents or mother and father living with you or facing hunger, or homelessness, after they have paid 15 percent of their income to Social Security for 50 years.

Now they can’t live without it, due to stupid spending in Washington over the last 20 years.

If our hired help in Washington doesn’t hear from all of us, now, they will destroy this country with more wasted, careless spending and stupid cuts that hurt us all.

This is a war against all U.S. citizens!

David Call

Standish

I would like to politely correct Erin Baxter of Wells, who states (in her letter to the editor of June 18) that the Baby Boomers are contributing to the so-called shortage of funds and high taxes for Social Security.

These are the facts: Social Security will not be bankrupted by the Baby Boomers. Yes, those born between 1946 and 1964 will place heavy demands on the system as they reach retirement age, but this generation has been paying into the system for 40 years or more!

Much of the money that they will be drawing on is their own. The notion that Boomers are living off the backs of their children and grandchildren is just not true.

More facts: At the end of 2010, the Social Security Trust Fund had a balance of $2.6 trillion. This fund will continue to expand until 2022, then begin to decline.

Still, there will be sufficient funds to pay full benefits through the year 2036. After that, 77 percent of benefits will still be paid. The administrative cost is just 0.09 percent. Is there another pension fund like this?

So, we should all ensure that Social Security is only tweaked and not completely changed or the management of its funds put into the hands of greedy politicians, investment brokers or corporate interests.

Valerie Betts

Boothbay

My conservative neighbors will cheer when I lose Social Security and affordable health care. They will cheer when my $9 per hour homemaker is reduced in pay even further from cuts by the governor and Legislature.

They will fight against unions out of principal because they set themselves above the rest. They will cheer privatizations as liberty-loving enterprises. They live next to Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin, just outside the realms of facts and social consciousness.

After the recent financial meltdown, the government protected the banks and bond holders (the real welfare recipients). The government subsidizes an exorbitant, mushrooming “military economy” of which no account is given by the media.

The president, Congress and press never address how American multinationals enforced decades-long stagnant wages, and are creating today’s joblessness, from which they now are reaping record earnings.

Austerity measures proposed by U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan at the federal level and Gov. LePage in Maine are as old as the IMF. The formula is identical to ones used from Latvia to Iceland to Greece to Spain to Portugal and to Ireland: slash entitlements, attack unions, drastically reduce wages, rob pension funds and cut government services to the bone.

Austerity measures have not worked in any European context; instead, they have instilled social and political chaos, as they will here.

The American worker is not responsible for sending his or her job to Asia, and is not to pay for the sins of government, finance and markets. Government workers are not to be made into pariahs only to be sold off to private profiteers.

Either America belongs to a people who seek a general welfare, or America loses its mandate, mission, sovereignty and democracy to its creditors (the investor and wealth sectors worldwide).

The real battle ahead not only is over numbers; it is over who will own and control America.

Michael T. Bucci

Damariscotta

It’s not just ‘smart meters’ people have to consider

Wireless “smart meters,” cellphones and cordless phones use EMF (electromagnetic field) communication. We should learn about this technology and the health risks associated with it. We need to demand safe products — and use them wisely.

Wireless smart meters emit EMF 24 hours a day — out from the wall they’re on and into the interior of the house as well. We can’t turn them off like cellphones. However, we have the option of keeping our old meters, which don’t use EMF (meter readers are necessary, and there is a cost; call CMP about this).

In CMP territory, even those of us who opt out will still be surrounded by the grid of EMF communications from regular meters to collector meters to antennas. (Bangor Hydro uses wired meters with no EMF.)

At the following website you can connect with Mainers concerned about wireless smart meters and EMF, and find links to health-related articles: smartmetersafety.com.

Manuals to new, more powerful multipurpose cellphones may tell you to hold the phone an inch from your head, or may include warnings that pregnant women should not hold the phone near the abdomen. (Such warnings were recently read aloud from a cellphone manual at a state legislative hearing.)

Two nationally known experts, one a research scientist and one a public health doctor, spoke at a legislative hearing about “non-thermal” EMF and health risks. The specific issue was whether there should be warning labels on cell packages concerning the use of cellphones by children.

We need to get the word out, especially to parents.

Jane Edwards

Vassalboro

Will new al-Qaida leader have guests dropping in?

It appears that al-Qaida has appointed someone named Ayman al-Zawahiri as their new leader.

Introductions need to be made: “SEAL Team 6, may I introduce Ayman al-Zawahiri.

“Ayman al-Zawahiri, may I (Pop! Pop! Splash!) introduce SEAL Team 6.”

Michael Frelk

Bath

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