Social Security and Medicare

No one wants to raise taxes except the bureaucrats. And we don’t need to raise taxes to reduce the national deficit. Only reduce spending.

Now we have almost 2 million service people and their families stationed outside the U.S. Besides their pay, it costs about $50,000 per person per year to support them with our tax dollars. Money is needed for housing, transportation, food, education, medical care, etc. Just cut that number by one-half or 1 million and it would result in a huge deficit reduction.

We protect many countries around the world with these service personnel. We provide military protection while they are investing in education and research and development, including high-tech machines. So bill these countries for the costs of the service people we have stationed there to protect them. See how fast our national deficit is eliminated.

And we support, in many countries around the world, giveaway programs with billions of our tax dollars each year. Eliminate them and we would have a huge surplus.

That would pay for a national health care program, housing the homeless, better education for our youth and training programs for the unemployed.

In 1989 we senior citizens who pay federal income tax will now pay a Medicare surtax. That is in addition to the annual Medicare program increase and the added charges for the catastrophic health care program.

We seniors had no voice in the Medicare surtax nor the option of choice for catastrophic health care. Neither do we have any chance of stopping Congress and the top executives from receiving their big fat pay raises. No wonder 99% are always re-elected. Their pay and fringe benefits are fantastic for the work they don’t do on our behalf!

W.H. STROEBEL

Laguna Hills