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Letters to the Editor

Submit these letters to the editor of your local paper. 

McCain Will Over Tax Working People

Senator McCain thinks US corporations are suffering from excessively high taxes and wants to cut their tax rate from 35% to 25%.  Yet the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office, in a report just released (August 12, 2008), found that two-thirds of corporations in the US paid no taxes from 1998 to 2005.  Since that figure included small businesses and start-ups, the GAO looked separately at large corporations and found that 28% of them paid no taxes whatsoever in 2005.  So much for McCain’s crocodile tears shed for corporations.  Since McCain would also retain Bush’s tax cuts for the rich, whom would he leave to pay our bills?  Working people whose taxes are deducted at the source, that’s who.

Click here to send this letter.

Veterans Should Not Be Cheated Out of Benefits

News reports in the Washington Post and other sources that a VA hospital in Texas requested its staff to stop diagnosing war veterans with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder because it is too costly to treat has left me outraged.

When these brave men and women joined the service, they did so with a set of expectations. One of those was that should they be injured, they would be cared for.  A mental injury is no less an injury than a physical one.  The health and well-being of those who put their lives on the line is priceless.  How dare the very government which sent then in harm’s way resort to semantic subterfuge to avoid providing basic health care to our veterans.

PTSD, as with all psychiatric disorders, affects not only the person diagnosed, but also his or her family, friends, and coworkers. It affects his or her ability to contribute to the nation's welfare by holding a job, learning valuable job skills, and rearing healthy children. The long-term costs of untreated psychiatric disorders eclipses the relatively modest costs of treatment.

It is unconscionable that the Bush Administration is allowing the soldiers they sent off to war to go without the care they deserve.  Our elected leaders must immediately reverse the action taken by this VA hospital and ensure that it never again be repeated.

Click here to send this letter.