Congress should cut wasteful programs, not debate welfare
Re: “Republicans want food stamps cut in big farm bill,” June 19
While Senate leaders argue over food stamp payments in the 2012 farm bill, they overlook a much simpler solution: Stop giving handouts to special interests under the flimsy pretense of guarding Americans’ health and safety.
Take, for example, the Catfish Inspection Program, a holdover from the 2008 farm bill, which is up for reinstatement. It transfers responsibility for the inspection of catfish imports from the FDA to the USDA, tightens import restrictions and supposedly protects domestic consumers from health threats poised by imported fish.
Meanwhile, it insulates domestic catfish producers from honest competition, damages U.S. relationships with trading partners such as Vietnam and China and costs the nation over $30 million.
True, this is chump change compared to the $80 billion the bill currently appropriates for food stamps. But one wonders why Congress continues to waste time debating the moral implications of welfare when it should be cutting wasteful, protectionist programs like this one.
Evelyn Smith
Crystal City
Free societies do not force people to buy insurance
Re: “Obamacare taxes those freeloading on the rest of us,” From Readers, June 18
Ron Lowe claims that any objection to the “individual mandate” section of Obamacare is due only to a Republican vendetta and that people who don’t want to be forced to buy insurance are selfish freeloaders.
Lowe is apparently unaware that there is a large group of Americans who take care of their bodies by eating in a way that promotes health and exercising regularly. As a result, they don’t go to doctors much, if at all.
For the past 20 years, I have worked for an employer that provides generous health benefits through Blue Cross Blue Shield, but I can count on one hand the number of times I have used it.
If I had been paying the $695/year fine that Obamacare would charge for not carrying insurance during these 20 years, I would have paid nearly $14,000. BCBS has not paid out anywhere near that amount on my behalf.
I applaud healthy people who choose to save the hundreds of dollars a month they would pay for health insurance, and pay cash on the rare occasions when they visit doctors.
Lowe also claims that “hundreds” of other things are mandated by government, although he named only three: income taxes, car insurance and driver’s licenses. He is wrong on all three counts. Nearly half of working Americans, and all the unemployed, pay no federal income taxes. And nobody is required to buy car insurance or have a driver’s license.
A free country does not mandate commerce. It’s that simple.
Donna Kepler
Arlington
Moral principles are not subject to popular opinion
Re: “GOP insists on driving away moderate voters,” From Readers, June 15
What Matthew Beck dismisses as “Neanderthal values,” conservative Republicans embrace as biblically based principles which, having been inspired by God, are righteous and unchangeable.These principles, not economic policies, made this country great.
Republicans are not pointedly driving people like Beck away, they’re simply standing on these proven principles and refuse to let a morally confused and arbitrary global community goad them into abandoning them.
Moral relativists like him cannot comprehend that God’s values are never subject to popular opinion.
Angela McIntosh
Frederick
