Editor,
My wife and I just arrived from Maine for a five-week stay in Bellingham, visiting our son and family. I saw your paper at the Bellingham airport. Being a newspaper junky my whole life, I picked it up and brought it to our rental. What a great surprise! A REAL local paper with local writers and reporters, a compelling editorial, clear and colorful photos, high school sports and local government information. I love it!
I started a local, nonprofit semi-volunteer [paper] run biweekly in Gorham, Maine, and, 25 years later, the Gorham Times is still in business.
What a wonderful and critical resource you have. Please keep up the good work!
Maynard Charron
Hollis Center, Maine
Editor,
Social Security and Medicare are NOT entitlement programs!
When describing Social Security and Medicare programs we see the term “entitlement” used by the news media and politicians. This is very misleading. Entitlement is defined as “one inherently deserving of privileges or special treatment.” These programs are not entitlements but are earned benefits. Americans earn their benefits by working and contributing to these programs throughout their lives.
Financed through payroll taxes on wages and self-employment income, employees and employers each make contributions that are credited to the Social Security trust funds to pay benefits. Over 94% are covered by Social Security created in 1935 during the Great Depression and about 179 million workers had earnings covered by Social Security and paid payroll taxes in 2021.
Strengthening these vital programs and developing a consensus remains a challenge that must be met by the nation’s leaders. Fortunately, decisions in 1983 built up a significant balance in Social Security trust funds so we have time to develop that consensus. The 2022 Trustees Report projects that Social Security trust funds will be able to pay full benefits until 2035. Despite impacts from COVID-related spending, the Medicare Trustees Report continues to show the positive impact of the Affordable Care Act on Medicare’s solvency. Part A Trust Fund is projected to pay full benefits until 2028, rather than the projected insolvency in 2017, prior to the Affordable Care Act.
Over 50% of workers have no retirement plans at work and millions more have little or no retirement savings. Social Security provides more than $1.6 trillion in annual economic stimulus as seniors spend their benefits for essential goods and services in their communities. Now is the time to strengthen these programs that remain central to the economic well-being of all Americans — those who are retired and those who one day hope to be the same.
D. Brady Green
Blaine
Editor,
OK, I confess that your reporting almost had me considering voting in favor of the new jail.
But then a single figure stood out to me. Your reporting touts the jail facility and alternatives in Skagit County as a model to be followed — but apparently, the Skagit County Jail currently holds about 200 inmates, and has room for more.
Considering that Skagit County has about half the population of Whatcom County, the fact that they jail more people than us does not exactly sound like a ringing endorsement for a system that supposedly reduces incarceration.
And then there is the survey of current inmates about what could have prevented them from going to jail in the first place: 54% of them said they needed a stable place to live, and 48% needed help with mental health issues.
Maybe I’ll wait for the county to send us a ballot initiative to greatly expand funding for low-income housing and mental health treatment. I’m confident it will be forthcoming.
Matteo Tamburini
Bellingham
Editor,
“We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Thomas Jefferson’s powerful words comprised the cornerstone of the Declaration of Independence, the foundation of the United States of America. The words were meant to be enduring when they were written and throughout the ages in our country.
However, these unalienable rights have been shredded for the dead, dare I say assassinated, students and school employees in Nashville, Uvalde and elsewhere. The parents, siblings, relatives, classmates, fellow employees and community members of the murder victims will certainly beg to differ about “unalienable rights.” Millions (billions?) weep and wonder why mass killings occur (and will continue) because politicians continue to be held in thrall by the mistaken belief that the Second Amendment prohibits sensible regulations of firearms.
In the Heller Case, Justice Scalia wrote “The Second Amendment right is not unlimited. We (concurring conservative Justices) do not cast doubt on concealed-weapons prohibitions, laws barring possession of firearms by felons, and the mentally ill, laws barring firearms in sensitive places like schools and government buildings, and laws imposing conditions on commercial sales of arms.” Politicians, the NRA and other lobbyists of the same ilk ignore Scalia in order to promote exemption of firearms from regulation. Even the Wild West knew such regulation was necessary.
July 4, 2023, will be the 247th anniversary of the first publication of the Declaration of Independence which was signed by 56 delegates to the Continental Congress. We, the people now need to write Letters to an Editor, to lobby politicians, to march in protest (if necessary) in order to convince recalcitrant politicians that the lives of our children demand sensible gun regulation.
Jerry Hunter
Bellingham
Editor,
I am so appreciative of having Cascadia Daily News to keep informed about all things Bellingham and Whatcom County! It is especially important as a news source in light of the slow disappearance of The Bellingham Herald print edition, which we also subscribe to and have since we moved here a few years ago. (More days than not, we have to notify them that we did not receive our paper those mornings, which seems like a harbinger.)
Recently I read an article about the moribund Salinas Californian, 143 years old, which, since the end of last year, has no reporters left. This is sad, but also dangerous. As one person said, “… it’s all the local happenings that aren’t covered; the watchdog on local government and the politicians that is missing, … [N]o one is looking at conflicts of interest. They could be running wild … Now we’re left reading the tweets of people who go to city council meetings.”
Social media is not a replacement for a fully functioning newspaper. Thank you, Ron Judd, and your staff, for working so diligently to keep Bellingham informed, and for the vision of David Syre in bringing CDN into being.
Lauren St. Pierre
Fairhaven
Editor,
The French pension-reform protesters are being joined by numerous other laborers, of all ages, who are justly concerned about their worsening pay thus standard of living, compared to that of previous generations.
This typically coincides with the wealthy getting wealthier — and little or no indication such significant income disparity may/will be corrected. How could it be?
The rich and powerful basically have their interests protected by the police and/or the military, which answer to the government.
Those armed forces have to physically enforce any law or regulation, even if they do not serve the basic needs of the many but rather the additional wealth of the relative few or the one.
Thus, unjust inequities and inequalities, even in modern democratic nations, can and often enough do persist. We see this appalling reality, for example, through proliferating over-reliance on food banks, exacerbated by unrelenting food-price inflation.
Long ago there were a few successful social/labor uprisings, including the French Revolution, that favored the masses, albeit after much suffering by the peasantry. I cannot see such successes happening again.
I can, however, see there having been valuable lessons learned from the said uprisings/revolutions, with the clarity of hindsight, by big money/power interests in avoiding any repeats … a figurative “How to Hinder Progressive Revolutions 101,” perhaps.
Frank Sterle Jr.
White Rock, British Columbia
Editor,
I’m writing in regards to the epidemic of homicidal attacks on the general public.
I believe, we as a society, are inadvertently encouraging these attacks and we need to take a step back and realize how often we support the belief that murdering people is necessary and sometimes even heroic. These are revenge killings and we need to stop justifying them. There is plenty of discussion about weaponry. But we also need to bring light to the largely ignored problems of false entitlement and extreme egotism. These mass murderers always seem to have both, starting with a full sense of false entitlement to take other people’s lives as necessary collateral damage in their personal war on whatever it is they don’t like.
On social media, you can hear this echoed when people say after an attack, “What did you think would happen? This person was fed up.” This supports the belief that it is perfectly acceptable, even expected, for a person to kill someone to seek revenge because it was for a “good” cause or committed by a person who claimed to be mistreated. This is wrong and hugely egotistical.
As a society, we motivate this entitlement by removing the responsibility from the attacker and instead blame trauma; stress; rejection; social, political or religious beliefs; failure; divorce; or job loss as legitimate reasons why a killer’s actions should be downplayed or even justified. For me, the goal is for all of us to challenge the mentality that executing people is an accepted form of stress relief, activism or cathartic comfort for a giant wounded ego. There are no reasons, no causes, no situations, no excuses, no life experiences in any context that support the brutal murder of innocent people, much less children, as a solution. We don’t need to fight to stop this. We need to unite to stop this.
LeeAnne Williams
Sumas
