EW Letter(s) of the Week

I almost came to the end of the ol' Weekly without finding a suitable candidate. The last two letters saved me. In tribute, I give you both. They both come from the over-the-top-conservative counter reaction to the typical over-the-top liberalism. In the first, we find out public schools are communist, and in the second we learn that illegal immigrants have it easy compared to native-born Americans.

ANOTHER GLUE-SNIFFER

Your article "Kicker Costs are Hidden" (1/3) pushes people in the wrong direction for understanding the finances of Oregon.

Fact: 33 percent of all taxes go to pay for PERS. That means every government budget for schools, etc, pays 33 percent of it's budget on average to PERS. Lane County owes approximately $100 million and the Springfield School District owes $62.5 million. The state is paying $270 million in interest to support PERS. The 2007 Report from Moody's verifies that net tax supported debt is up more than 300 percent in the last 5 years.

Getting some of our money back is evil? The PERS debt at the local levels could have been offset by forward contracting or hedging, which was verified by State Economist Michael Kennedy. They chose not to [do] that, and instead they shifted that cost off to the children and their families. The same with Lane County. They also failed to forward their gas costs; a loss of $5 million for each entity, once again financial incompetence shifted to the taxpayer and their families.

If you're going to make a statement about slashing money for schools, health care, and other vital services, you need to understand the real costs. The abolition of private property means tyranny. Government wage rates are an average of 40 percent than the private sector; their benefits; 60 percent higher than the private sector.

Schools: There are two-year waiting lines for children to attend private schools. Most people do not want their children to attend government schools. What happened to the rights of those have a different view of what is right for their own children? You sound like another "glue-sniffer," socialist/communist for government tyranny, which is the major form of greed and selfishness, not the "kicker-refund" people.

Fred Starkey, Springfield

NATIVE ALIEN

I just became aware that illegal aliens can get driver's licenses, live, work, anywhere in the U.S., and get over the borders easily, while I, a native born American, can no longer travel from one state to another with American driver's ID that is only a few months too old. Oh, even though I have Medicare cards, health insurance benefit cards, local bank accounts and Visa debit cards.

Amazingly, only a few years ago, in a major U.S. city, foreign students on expired visas, whom I lived with, had jobs, and immigration never looked for them. They disappeared into America. I need to learn from my foreign alien friends, I guess, because now I am the foreign outsider in my own land.

D.H. Bucher, Eugene