Seniors need to act

Dear editor:

I urge all seniors to contact your representatives, regardless how you voted about the following matters:

Medicare and Social Security: House Speaker Paul Ryan has on his desk a bill that has passed both Republican Senate and House that voucherizes Medicare and reduces Social Security. Experts are predicting that these two items will be passed early in Trump's presidency. Forget Trump's promise to save these two programs as is. But to get last minute support, Trump evidently promised to throw grandma off the cliff. It's the old bait and switch that Republicans have been using for three decades to destroy these programs, not because they don't work, but because it proves that government can work for the middle class.

More tax cuts for the rich and big corporations at the expense of seniors and other middle class people. The confidence scheme is that everyone gets a tax cut. However, the rich get huge cuts while everyone else suffers, and their teeny cut is eaten many times over with reduced necessary services, many nickel and dime local and state taxes, and poorer living conditions. Trump would not have won if the right-wing billionaires hadn't realized that Trump would be giving them at least a trillion to divide among themselves, Wall Street and mega-corporations.

In 2001, opponents to George W. Bush's tax cuts for the rich predicted it would produce a Great Depression because trickle-down economics was a major cause for the last Depression. Too much money sloshing around at the top leads to wild speculations, bubbles and crashes. Republicans created an economic meltdown in 2008, but never really were blamed. I hope the majority of Americans will recognize in time this trickle-down con game successfully used by the Republicans since 1981.

War with Iran: Such a war will take money away from the middle class and poor. Especially seniors will suffer financially as they have due to the Iraq War. Trump's advisers for foreign affairs, such as Bolton, Sessions, Giuliani, Gingrich, etc., have been for war with Iran for many years. We hate Iran; Iran hates us. Why not war? A war with Iran, a more formidable opponent than Iraq, will cost trillions of dollars to wage and cost thousands of American lives. I feel that oil giants and Russia want this war to jack up oil prices like the Iraq War did. Russia's main export is oil and Putin is suffering because of the low oil prices. Ditto for oil companies!

The right wingers pulled out every dirty trick in the bag to get a Trump win. In 2000, with trillions of dollars at stake, everything was done to select George W. Bush by the Supreme Court. More money for the billionaires was at risk in 2016. Why Hillary Clinton might have used a little of their chump change to pay for schooling for the less affluent, for leaving Social Security and Medicare alone, and by asking Wall Street to pay a little in a rapid transaction tax. Can't have that!

Linda Woodbury

Hot Springs

Editorial on 12/07/2016

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