Hands off pension plans

Hands off pension plans

My wife and I retired from teaching after a combined 70 years of working with our states’ kids. We stayed in education, not because of the salary but because it provided us with good medical benefits and a decent pension.

We are among the luckier teachers as we are in TRS 1 where we got 2 percent times the number of years taught—up to 30 years maximum — times our highest two years salary averaged. Our medical benefits continue but are expensive, at almost $1,100 per month coming out of our retirement checks.

In the past, Olympia has seen fit to grant Boeing a $3 billion tax break one year when funds were flush. Zero increases for teachers. Red budget ink turned black several years ago because more than $900 million in the retirement system were taken to balance the budget, illegally in my opinion, as the fund is a dedicated fund. Now the TRS 1 and PERS 1 plans are soon going to be $2 billion short due to legislative inaction when times were good. No repayments!

We put up with a lack salary increases during the “good times” because we had a decent pension plan and medical benefits. Pensions are a promise.

Hands off the pension plans! They’re not Olympia’s private bank.

Jim and Donna Schaefer

VANCOUVER

Laird’s column missed real problem

I feel sorry for John Laird for all the fancy footwork he had to do in his Nov. 22 opinion piece, “Time to tell the World: We’re a Fort!” All this dancing around the real problem does not solve it. The real problem is that as long as the name Vancouver is associated with our city, it doesn’t matter if it is alone as it is now, or “Fort Vancouver” or “Vancouver Barracks” or “America’s Vancouver.” Vancouver, to people not aware of our city, suggests Vancouver, B.C.

If I tell people not familiar with the fact that I live in Vancouver, Wash., most conclude that it’s a suburb of Vancouver, B.C., south of the Canadian border but still a suburb of the B.C. city. Short of a complete name change, there appears little we can do about it.

Since we named our county for the Clark of Lewis and Clark, should we consider Lewis? Oh, yes — there is Fort Lewis to contend with.

Dale Madson

VANCOUVER

Democrats can reduce deficits

In the Nov. 14 letter, “Capitalism works when you free it,” Lee Powers laments, “How is it that deficits are never treated as a problem in a Democratic administration?” But “never” should be used cautiously.

Had Powers cracked a history book, he’d know that Bill Clinton made deficit reduction a core promise of his 1992 campaign. The Clinton administration fulfilled that promise in impressive fashion, posting in 1998 the first budget surplus since Nixon and surpluses for the subsequent years 1999 through 2001 (CBO, “Historical Figures”).

Powers also perpetuates a myth when he includes in his letter a list of 10 maxims falsely attributed to Abraham Lincoln. Known as “The Ten Cannots,” they were written in 1916 by William J.H. Boetcker, an conservative Presbyterian minister. Though the sentiments of Boetcker’s decalogue sometimes run parallel, the quotations of Lincoln reflect a special regard for community, interdependence and compassion in society.

How did Lincoln feel about government? From “Fragments on Government,” 1854: “The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves — in their separate and individual capacities.”

Tom Kniffin

VANCOUVER

Fact check the liberals, too

I chuckled seeing the Nov. 21 Associated Press headline “GOP uses scientists’ advice to try to stoke women’s fear.” This is the wire service that assigned 11 writers to fact check Sarah Palin’s new book, but never paid such elaborate attention to Obama’s books, or Bill Clinton’s, Al Gore’s or others. The only word used more often by our president than “me” is “crisis.” I never saw the AP associate “crisis” with stoking fear.

Recently Gore was on “The Tonight Show,’ and stated that two kilometers below the earth’s surface, the temperature is “several million degrees.” Gore went on to say we can tap that energy because we can drill with bits that can take that temperature. AP didn’t fact check this; they didn’t even report it.

Greg Zilker

BRUSH PRAIRIE

Obama shows respect for military

I would like to know where letter writer Thomas E. Dent (“Commit to job as commander,” Nov. 21) was with his criticism when George W. Bush was putting on his infamous “Mission Accomplished” photo op. Did he not realize that our troops were sent into battle with unarmored vehicles and no plan of what was to follow once they secured the country? Is that what Dent calls leadership? Surely, the lack of compassion shown by Bush’s refusal to greet caskets returning from his war of choice, deserves some criticism.

Dent’s opinion is off base. Obama’s presence at the return of the fallen is what should be expected of a commander in chief, to let us know that he is aware of the consequences of the decisions he makes. If Dent thinks the last two leaders of this country were examples of heroic leadership then pity him and any others of like mind.

Thomas E. Martin

vancouver

Adoption offers a great solution

Letter writer Crystal Steinmueller (“Allow access to abortion services,” Nov. 24) asserts that “about half of all American women will have an unintended pregnancy and more than one-third will choose to have an abortion by age 45.” While I cannot vouch for her statistics, I can speak from the heart as an adoptive parent of three beautiful girls, all of whom came from what might be termed “unintended pregnancies.” Thousands of families wait a seeming eternity (our own wait was an agonizing five years) to adopt, while healthy, “unintended” babies are killed daily in abortion clinics. I find something terribly tragic about this calculus.

Scott Rainey

VANCOUVER

Another method of opting out

In the most recent Senate version of the health care bill, there is a provision for states to “opt-out” of the health care reforms contained within the bill. One wonders that, if states opt-out of “government-controlled health care,” would they also opt-out of all government-controlled health care programs?

It would appear that states would be given the option of picking and choosing what programs would apply to that state. Perhaps, it should be included in the bill that the opt-out is for all government health care, including Medicare and Veterans Administration programs. That way the citizens of the state would be protected from all “government health care bureaucrats.”

Hugh Shuford

VANCOUVER