Close the Borders; We Can’t Afford Illegals : Mayor’s race: Get rid of fat police pensions and make ‘taggers’ clean up their mess.

Day after day, people from every country in the world enter the United States illegally. Every day, they find their way to Los Angeles. This has been going on for years, and now our city is filled with hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of illegal aliens.

People say, “They aren’t hurting anyone,” or “They only take the jobs that no one else will do.” Is this really true? When illegal aliens come into Los Angeles, do they have a medical insurance card in their pocket? What about school tuition for their kids? Do they have auto insurance? Money for legal fees? When they need any of the above, who pays for it?

You do.

Don’t take my word for it. Go to any county hospital or your local welfare office. Talk to people there. See where your tax money is going.

It costs $5,500 a year to teach a child in the Los Angeles public schools. From kindergarten to the 12th grade, that’s $71,500.

Ask yourself a few questions: Is your child in an overcrowded classroom? Does your child have a computer at school? Is your child being taught in a foreign language half the time? Does the city want to pass a new bond issue to build more schools? Is this what you want?

About now, some of you will be thinking about the Statue of Liberty and the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” One hundred years ago, the United States didn’t have “huddled masses.” Now it does, and the masses want their birthright.

Every dollar spent on an illegal alien’s education is a dollar not spent on your child. Every dollar spent for welfare, legal fees and prison costs is a dollar that should have been spent for citizens. For the past 40 years, we have maintained an army in South Korea to protect its borders. Why do we spend billions protecting South Korea’s borders and leave our wide open?

On the police: The LAPD is understaffed. The police cars are old and tired. The city has tried to raise bond money to buy communications equipment; it probably has to scrape the bottom of the barrel to come up with the money to pay Daryl Gates his $128,000 pension. How about former chief Ed Davis’ $125,000 pension? How much do the average police and fire personnel get? Half of the city’s budget goes to pensions.

If the voters had been given those numbers instead of TV commercials depicting widows, orphans and the disabled, then police and fire pensions would never have changed. If Social Security is good enough for the voter, why isn’t it good enough for city employees? A detailed account of where tax dollars go should be printed annually by the city’s newspapers.

On graffiti: If you spray it, you scrub it. What’s with the local judges? What’s wrong with making the punishment fit the crime? Convicted “taggers” should spend time cleaning up their mess, not obtaining art school scholarships.