Hilo
Is it too late?
I thought President Obama’s State of the Union speech was quite eloquent as usual, and he did touch on some very serious issues. But, as I often lament, you can always count on things being worse than what we are led to believe. The look on Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s face during the State of the Union speech to me was very telling indeed!
I hate to say it, but it looks like it may already be too late to do anything about downsizing government, let alone dealing seriously with the debt and the deficit, with no tax increases on the horizon to save us from a slow march toward default.
That to me will spell a lifestyle decline for many of us, when Uncle Sam can no longer pay his bills and our retirement and Social Security checks stop, along with the other entitlement benefits we have all grown used to.
Some experts say that our financial system is residual enough to resist such a calamity, and I would love to agree, but it seems like, from where I sit, all the stops have been pulled out, and there’s not much left to help prevent such a disaster from happening.
I have always resisted being the purveyor of doom and gloom and have tried as hard as I possibly can to look at things positively, but lately my negative is trumping my positive, and I struggle to keep that flicker of hope alive.
Major cuts, coupled with big tax increases for everyone — and I mean everyone, not just the wealthy — would certainly be very painful, but I would truly prefer that to shades of the Great Depression, when people were jumping from … well, you know the rest! By this, I don’t mean to upset anyone beyond everyday concerns we all face, but if and when the time comes to make sacrifices and dig deeper, please think about the alternatives.
Carl F. Goebel
Naalehu
Tired of the rhetoric
I am so tired of reading the Marxist diatribes posted as “letters to the editor” in the Tribune-Herald, most recently that of Carol R. Campbell from Keaau. Her blatant, ill-informed, leftist rhetoric — especially her unfavorable remarks about the military — makes me wonder if she’s ever stopped to think about why she has the freedom to rant and rave. It’s because brave young men and women in the U.S. military take an oath to protect all of us, even those who sit around and “occupy whatever,” instead of going out and getting a job or trying to achieve something meaningful in their lifetime.
By the way, those who protest on Wall Street, etc., do not speak for 99 percent of the population. They certainly do not speak for me, and I’m annoyed and angry when they act as if they do. Personally, I believe they represent less than 1 percent of the 99 percent.
Instead, I prefer to let my son represent me. He recently left college and an athletic scholarship to join the military. I was never more proud then when he officially became a soldier two weeks ago at Fort Jackson in South Carolina.
Boot camp made a fine and disciplined man out of our son, and he can parade that in front of the world! He has committed himself to die for this country, if needed, and we stand by his decision.
Military service is a long-standing tradition in our family. My father proudly served in the Navy at Pearl Harbor. It wasn’t until decades later that we learned the former USSR had most of its submarines, and their nuclear warheads, trained on Hawaii in the 1970s. They were going to annihilate us while we ignorantly went about our daily lives.
Outside threats are as real today as they were back then, and to think we’d be better off without a solid military is ludicrous. I’m over all of the freeloading people who do nothing but waste the precious freedoms given to them. In this case, ignorance is not bliss, it’s just plain dumb.
Karen Welsh
Hilo