If anyone living within the Town of Berthoud limits is interested in representing our community by serving on the Town Board, you only have until February 13 to submit your application showing your intent to run for office.

Call or email our (wonderful) Town Clerk, Mary Cowdin as follows:

Mary K. Cowdin
E-mail: mcowdin@berthoud.org
(970)532-2643

No one among the current Board has declared his/her intentions to run. They also have until February 13 to declare.

Please consider running for office!

Judy Lehn

Berthoud

Dennis Speicher

Dennis Eugene Speicher, 71, of Gill, Colorado was born October 16, 1940 in Holyoke, Colorado to Gordon Leroy and Rosie Opal (Owens) Speicher. He died January 20, 2012 at Aspen House in Loveland.

Dennis was a life long farmer who had a deep love of the land. He farmed in the Berthoud-Loveland area for over 45 years. In 2002, he retired from farming due to health issues, and he and his wife moved to Gill to enjoy their retirement. He had a long love for horses, which led him to enjoy many horse related activities, and meet and make many friends across the country. He owned and operated Speicher Harness Shop, where he made custom draft horse harness. His love of draft horses was formed when, as a boy, his Dad farmed with horses in the Holyoke area. He loved to sit behind a team of horses, and hear the quiet of the outdoors. He was a charter member of the Northern Colorado Draft Horse Association, holding most offices in that club over the years. He was also a member of the Antique Caterpillar Club, and a past member of the Berthoud Volunteer Fire Department. In addition to horses and antique equipment, Dennis loved to camp and fish, ride his motorcycle and spend time at the local coffee shop, reminiscing with friends.

He married Marjorie Schroetlin in Loveland on August 7, 1958. They were blessed with two children: Denise and Douglas.

Dennis is survived by his wife, Marje, of over 53 years, daughter Denise Lauerman and husband Steven of Loveland, son Douglas Speicher and wife Pam of Greeley, sisters Nadine Hooley of Loveland, and Donna (Calvin) Lohnes of Johnstown, and brother Devere (Nancy) Speicher of Loveland: 3 beloved grandaughters, Tanya Banulis (Brad) of Montrose, Raquel Wertsbaugh of Salida, and Heather Speicher (Steve) of Ft. Collins. Also 3 adored great-grandchildren, Landon Walker, Tyler and Addison Banulis, and numerous nieces, nephews, aunts and uncles, and cousins.

He was preceded in death by his parents, son-in-law Jim Wertsbaugh, and two grandsons, Casey and Richard Wertsbaugh.

Viewing will be Tuesday, January 24, 2012 from 5:00-7:00 p.m. at Kibbey-Fishburn Funeral Home. Funeral services will be held Wednesday, January 25, 2012, 10:00 a.m., at the First Christian Church, 2000 N. Lincoln Ave, Loveland.

Memorial contributions may be made to Pathways Hospice or Aspen House to further education and training for dementia and Alzheimer patients and caregivers, in care of Kibbey-Fishburn Funeral Home, 1102 N. Lincoln Ave, Loveland, CO 80537.

Dear Editor,

How can it be that a year has passed since Mom died?

After a two-decades long descent into dementia, dependence, and debilitation, Dorothy is free from Alzheimer’s, but her survivors are not. Alzheimer’s continues to devastate us, infecting our every memory of this beautiful, beloved person.

As if this long, slow goodbye were not awful enough, the disease’s after effects are nth degree atrocious. When Mom died on Jan. 26, 2011, part of me was grateful her suffering was over; the other part had no idea then how ours would continue.

I have since vowed I will do what I can to help others avoid the physical, financial, and psychological trauma that is Alzheimer’s.

How?

Two words: aggressive advocacy.

A year ago on Jan. 4, Alzheimer’s activists were instrumental in moving a bitterly divided, bipartisan Congress to unanimously pass the National Alzheimer’s Project Act (NAPA). More than 50,000 emails, nearly 10,000 phone calls, and 1,000-plus meetings led legislators to agree the only way to overcome the escalating Alzheimer’s crisis is to create a coordinated national plan of action.

A draft of said strategy awaits your input at www.napa.alz.org. 

While online there, please contact Representative Cory Gardner, and Senators Michael Bennet and Mark Udall, and let them know they mustn’t allow either the Alzheimer’s Breakthrough Act or the HOPE for Alzheimer’s Act to languish for another session. Their immediate co-sponsorship and our collective voices will make a difference in 2012.

The millions living and dying with Alzheimer’s can’t wait for another anniversary to pass.

Brenda Rader Mross, Ambassador
Alzheimer’s Association Northern Colorado Chapter

by Brian J. Trautman

Each year, Congress authorizes the budget of the Department of Defense through a National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The NDAA of 2012, however, is unlike any previous ones. This year’s legislation contains highly controversialprovisions that empower the Armed Forces to engage in civilian law enforcement and to selectively suspend due process and habeas corpus, as well as other rights guaranteed by the 5th and 6th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, for terror suspects apprehended on U.S. soil. The final version of the bill passed the House on December 14, the Senate the following day (ironically, the 220th birthday of the Bill of Rights). It was signed into law by President Obama on New Year’s Eve. With his signature, for the first time since the Internal Security Act of 1950 and the dark days of the McCarthy era that followed, our government has codified the power of indefinite detention into law.

This pernicious law poses one of the greatest threats to civil liberties in our nation’s history. Under Section 1021 of the NDAA,foreign nationals who are alleged to have committed or merely “suspected” of sympathizing with or providing any level of support to groups the U.S. designates as terrorist organization or an affiliate or associated force may be imprisoned without charge or trial “until the end of hostilities.” The law affirms the executive branch’s authority granted under the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) and broadens the definition and scope of “covered persons.” But because the “war on terror” is a war on a tactic, not on a state, it has no parameters or timetable. Consequently, this law can be used by authorities to detain (forever) anyone the government considers a threat to national security and stability – potentially even demonstrators and protesters exercising their First Amendment rights.

One popular myth surrounding this law (which has been marketed well by the White House and the mainstream media) is that it does not pertain to U.S. persons (citizens and resident aliens). While the law does not explicitly target U.S. persons, it neither excludes nor protects them. Section 1022 of the law covers U.S. persons. The section allows for open-ended executive judgment with regard to the handling of U.S. persons. In other words, the detention of U.S persons is optional, rather than a requirement as it is for non-U.S. persons. Jonathan Turley, legal scholar and professor at George Washington University, explains that “the provision merely states that nothing in the provisions could be construed to alter Americans’ legal rights. Since the Senate clearly views citizens are not just subject to indefinite detention but even execution without a trial, the change offers nothing but rhetoric to hide the harsh reality.”

Regardless of whether or not this law is interpreted as applying to U.S. persons, by specifically targeting foreign nationals, the NDAA violates the “equal protection” clause of the 14th Amendment, which guarantees that all people be treated the same under the law. Therefore, any way you slice it, this law is unconstitutional.

Accompanying the President’s signature was a signing statement which was intended to clarify some of his perspectives on the NDAA’s most controversial language. The statement read in part, “my administration will not authorize the indefinite military detention without trial of American Citizens.” However, what is important to keep in mind here is that the statement refers only to what this administration pledges, not to the intentions or requirements of future administrations. As television host and political commentator Rachel Maddow put it in recent segment, “you now live in a country where, technically at least, the military has a legal role to play in civilian law enforcement.” Dr. Maddow pointed that while this may or may not be invoked during the present administration, “thanks to this bill…if this president changes his mind or some other president in the future does want to arrest Americans and lock them up in military custody forever without trial, our government statutorily now claims that as its right.”

Although more than two-thirds of the House voted in favor of the NDAA, not every member was on board with it. Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) remarked that “what this bill does is it takes a wrecking ball to the United States Constitution.” Rep. Paul Tonko (D-NY) described this bill as a threat to “the inalienable due process rights afforded to every American citizen under the Constitution.”

The NDAA’s draconian detention provisions have received most of the attention, effectively overshadowing the fact that this legislation continues a trend of spending vast sums of taxpayer money on so-called “defense” objectives. According to Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), one of only 13 members of the Senate to vote against the NDAA, “the bill continues to authorize heavy spending on defense despite the end of the 9-year-old war in Iraq. Ironically, the Senate vote came on the same day when Defense Secretary Panetta was in Baghdad officially declaring that our military mission there has ended and that virtually all of the combat troops will leave Iraq by the end of the year.  At a time when we have tripled defense spending since 1997 and spend more today on defense than the rest of the world combined.”

The executive branch has acquired greater authoritarian and unaccountable power under this law which disaffirms justice as a fundamental human right. It brings the illegal practice of extraordinary rendition home. Tom Parker of Amnesty International USA argues that the NDAA “provides a framework for ‘normalizing’ indefinite detention and making Guantanamo a permanent feature of American life.” What democracy and civil liberties we did enjoy in this country before the NDAA of 2012 became law have been severely weakened, and our nation’s moral and legal credibility in the world, which has been gradually declining since the so-called “war on terror” was declared by President Bush, has been diminished further.

The NDAA of 2012 increases the United States’ worldwide detention authority. In doing so it further entrenches a culture of war in American society. According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), “The statute is particularly dangerous because it has no temporal or geographic limitations, and can be used by this and future presidents to militarily detain people captured far from any battlefield… the breadth of the NDAA’s detention authority violates international law because it is not limited to people captured in the context of an actual armed conflict as required by the laws of war.”

As difficult as it might be to have any faith left in the Congress, there is hope on the horizon for overturning at least the portion of the law that threatens U.S. persons. The Due Process Guarantee Act of 2011, H.R. 3702, authored by Rep. John Garamendi (D-CA) and Martin Heinrich (D- NM) and currently co-sponsored by 32 House members, including the ranking members of the Armed Services, Foreign Affairs, and Judiciary committees, clarifies existing U.S. law and states unequivocally that the government cannot indefinitely detain American citizens or lawful U.S. residents. It ensures that U.S. citizens and permanent residents on American soil are protected. The bill amends the Non-Detention Act of 1971, clarifying that a congressional authorization for the use of military force – such as that in the NDAA which included the detainee provisions – does not authorize the indefinite detention without charge or trial of U.S. citizens apprehended on U.S. soil. H.R. 3702 is companion legislation to Senator Dianne Feinstein’s Due Process Guarantee Act of 2011, S. 2003.

Since 2001, the Patriot Act, the AUMF, and now the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 have eroded of many of our most valued constitutional rights. Our nation is moving away from government “of the people, by the people, for the people” and toward a totalitarian state. The late historian, Howard Zinn observed, “Terrorism has replaced Communism as the rationale for the militarization of the country [America], for military adventures abroad, and for the suppression of civil liberties at home. It serves the same purpose, serving to create hysteria.”

It is up to the American people to stop this fear-mongering and this unfettered growth of the military industrial complex. How? Americans can begin by actively dissenting against laws that violate their Constitution and their conscience. Dr. Zinn believed very strongly that “dissent is the highest form of patriotism.

If the Constitution is to be defended against those who aspire to destroy it, all Americans have a duty to themselves and their country to stand up and demand progressive change toward a culture of peace and justice. One of the most effective ways to do this is by engaging in methods of nonviolent direct action, as demonstrated by the Occupy Wall Street movement. As more Americans embrace these methods and the Occupy movement grows stronger, Washington will be forced to end its campaign of militarizing law enforcement and American society or risk being voted out of office. Only then can the freedoms and civil liberties the people are promised in the Constitution be restored.

Brian J. Trautman is a military veteran and an instructor of peace and world order studies at Berkshire Community College located in Pittsfield, MA. He is an active member of Veterans for Peace and Berkshire Citizens for Peace and Justice.

January 16, 2012
By John W. Whitehead

“Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes… known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.… No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”—James Madison

America’s troops may be returning home from Iraq, but contrary to President Obama’s assertion that “the tide of war is receding,” we’re far from done paying the costs of war. In fact, at the same time that Obama is reducing the number of troops in Iraq, he’s replacing them with military contractors at far greater expense to the taxpayer and redeploying American troops to other parts of the globe, including Africa, Australia and Israel. In this way, the war on terror is privatized, the American economy is bled dry, and the military-security industrial complex makes a killing—literally and figuratively speaking.

The war effort in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan has already cost taxpayers more than $2 trillion and could go as high as $4.4 trillion before it’s all over. At least $31 billion (and as much as $60 billion or more) of that $2 trillion was lost to waste and fraud by military contractors, who do everything from janitorial and food service work to construction, security and intelligence—jobs that used to be handled by the military. That translates to a loss of $12 million a day since the U.S. first invaded Afghanistan. To put it another way, the government is spending more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety.

Over the past two decades, America has become increasingly dependent on military contractors in order to carry out military operations abroad (in fact, the government’s extensive use of private security contractors has surged under Obama). According to the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States can no longer conduct large or sustained military operations or respond to major disasters without heavy support from contractors. As a result, the U.S. employs at a minimum one contractor to support every soldier deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq (that number increases dramatically when U.S. troop numbers decrease). For those signing on for contractor work, many of whom are hired by private contracting firms after serving stints in the military, it is a lucrative, albeit dangerous, career path (private contractors are 2.75 times more likely to die than troops). Incredibly, while base pay for an American soldier hovers somewhere around $19,000 per year, contractors are reportedly pulling in between $150,000 – $250,000 per year.

The exact number of military contractors on the U.S. payroll is hard to pin down, thanks to sleight-of-hand accounting by the Department of Defense and its contractors. However, according to a Wartime Contracting Commission report released in August 2011, there are more than 260,000 private contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, more than the number of ground troops in both countries. As noted, that number increases dramatically when troops are withdrawn from an area, as we currently see happening in Iraq. Pratap Chatterjee of the Center for American Progress estimates that “if the Obama administration draws down to 68,000 troops in Afghanistan by September 2012, they will need 88,400 contractors at the very least, but potentially as many as 95,880.”

With paid contractors often outnumbering enlisted combat troops, the American war effort dubbed by George W. Bush as the “coalition of the willing” has since evolved into the “coalition of the billing.” The Pentagon’s Central Command counts 225,000 contractors working in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Between December 2008 and December 2010, the total number of private security contractors in Afghanistan increased by 413% while troop levels increased 200%. Private contractors provide a number of services, including transport, construction, drone operation, and security. One military contractor, Blackbird, is composed of former CIA operatives who go on secret missions to recover missing and captured US soldiers.  Then there is the Lincoln Group which became famous for engaging in covert psychological operations by planting stories in the Iraqi press that glorified the U.S. mission. Global Strategies Group guards the consulate in Basra for $401 million. SOC Inc. protects the US embassy for $974 million.

Unfortunately, fraud, mismanagement and corruption have become synonymous with the U.S. government’s use of military contractors. McClatchy News “found that U.S. government funding for at least 15 large-scale programs and projects [in Afghanistan] grew from just over $1 billion to nearly $3 billion despite the government’s questions about their effectiveness or cost.” One program started off as a modest wheat program and “ballooned into one of America’s biggest counterinsurgency projects in southern Afghanistan despite misgivings about its impact.” Another multi-billion-dollar program resulted in the construction of schools, clinics and other public buildings that were so poorly built that they might not withstand a serious earthquake and will have to be rebuilt. Then there was the $300 million diesel power plant that was built despite the fact that it wouldn’t be used regularly “because its fuel cost more than the Afghan government could afford to run it regularly.” RWA, a group of three Afghan contractors, was selected to build a 17.5 mile paved road in Ghazni province. They were paid $4 million between 2008 and 2010 before the contract was terminated with only 2/3 of a mileof road paved.

Mind you, with the U.S. spending more than $2 billion a week in Afghanistan, these examples of ineptitude and waste represent only a fraction of what is being funded by American taxpayer dollars. (Investigative reports reveal that large amounts of cash derived from U.S. aid and logistics spending are being flown out of the country on a regular basis by Afghan officials, including $52 million by the Afghan vice president, who was allowed to keep the money.) Yet what most Americans fail to realize is that we’re funding the very individuals we claim to be fighting. The war effort has become so corrupt that U.S. taxpayers are not only being bilked by military contractors but are also being forced to indirectly fund insurgents and warlords in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the Taliban, which receives money from military contractors in exchange for protection. This is rationalized away as a “cost of doing business” in those countries. As the Financial Times reports, the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan “found that extortion of funds from US construction and transportation projects was the second-biggest funding source for insurgent groups.”

Despite what one might think, the boom in contracting work in the war zones isn’t necessarily aiding U.S. employment, given that large numbers of contractors are actually foreign nationals. For example, over 90% of the private security contractors in Afghanistan are Afghans. One contractor, Triple Canopy, most of whose guards are from Uganda and Peru, has a $1.53 billion contract with the State Department to protect its employees. ArmorGroup North America (AGNA), which is contracted to secure the US embassy in Kabul, hires many Nepalese (known as Gurkhas) whose English is not proficient. “One guard described the situation as so dire that if he were to say to many of the Gurkhas, ‘There is a terrorist standing behind you,’ those Gurkhas would answer ‘Thank you sir, and good morning.’”

The practices employed by the military contractors also reflect poorly on America’s commitment to human rights—both in the way that they treat their employees and in their employees’ behavior. For example, Triple Canopy houses its employees in overcrowded shipping containers. In addition to soliciting underage Chinese prostitutes, AGNA contractors have also been described as “peeing on people, eating potato chips out of [buttock] cracks, vodka shots out of [buttock] cracks (there is video of that one), broken doors after drnken [sic] brawls, threats and intimidation from those leaders participating in this activity…” This behavior is not reserved to lower level employees, and has been observed and even encouraged by upper level management. Blackwater employees have also been accused of weapons smuggling as well as cocaine and steroid use. Despite all this, Blackwater—which, as the New York Times has reported, “created a web of more than 30 shell companies or subsidiaries in part to obtain millions of dollars in American government contracts after the security company came under intense criticism for reckless conduct in Iraq”—still won a cut of a $10 billion contract given out by the State Department in 2010.

Despite the high levels of corruption, waste, mismanagement and fraud by military contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. government continues to shield them, resisting any attempts at greater oversight or accountability. War, after all, has become a huge money-making venture, and America, with its vast military empire, is one of its best customers. Indeed, the American military-industrial complex has erected an empire unsurpassed in history in its breadth and scope and dedicated to conducting perpetual warfare throughout the earth.

What most Americans fail to recognize is that these ongoing wars have little to do with keeping the country safe and everything to do with enriching the military industrial complex at taxpayer expense. It’s the military industrial complex (the illicit merger of the armaments industry and the government) that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us against more than 50 years ago and which has come to represent perhaps the greatest threat to the nation’s fragile infrastructure today.

Unfortunately, Americans have been inculcated with a false, misplaced sense of patriotism about the military that equates devotion to one’s country with supporting the war machine so that any mention of cutting back on the massive defense budget is immediately met with outrage. Yet the military-industrial complex is engaged in a deadly game, one that all presidents, including Obama, foster. And the consequences, as Eisenhower recognized, are grave:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children…This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

By Lawrence S. Wittner

Are American politicians out of sync with the public when it comes to foreign policy?  There is considerable reason to believe so.

Throughout the scramble for the GOP presidential nomination, the major candidates have certainly been rabidly nationalistic.  In a major foreign policy address on October 7, 2011, Mitt Romney proclaimed that “the twenty-first century can and must be an American Century.”  Championing a vast military buildup, he argued that, to secure this “American Century,” the United States should have “the strongest military in the world.”  By contrast, he assailed the “shameful” role of the United Nations and other international institutions and declared that he did not see any reason to obey them—or the international law they represented—when it did not suit the U.S. government.

Romney’s newly-anointed top competitor, Rick Santorum, says nothing about the United Nations, international cooperation, or international law in the “10 Steps to Promote Our Interests Around the World” posted on his campaign website.  Instead, he argues that the United States is “intrinsically better prepared to lead than any other nation.”  He adds:  “I truly do believe that we are ‘the last best hope of earth,’” but, alas, under President Obama, “we have been weak where we should have been strong and we have been appeasing of evil.”  Naturally, then, Americans should be “increasing our military preparedness.”

By contrast, polls show that most Americans favor a more cooperative world order based on international law, a stronger United Nations, and a less dominant role for the United States in world affairs.

In a World Public Opinion poll of sixteen nations in 2009, 69 percent of Americans supported the view that nations are obliged to abide by international law even when doing so is at odds with their national interest.  Furthermore, a 2010 poll by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found 82 percent of Americans favored ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (rejected by the GOP-dominated Senate in 1999), 70 percent favored participation in the International Criminal Court (rejected by President George W. Bush), and 67 percent backed a new international treaty to combat climate change.  In December 2008, a World Public Opinion poll found that 77 percent of Americans backed an international treaty abolishing nuclear weapons.

Furthermore, most Americans favor expanding the role of the United Nations in world affairs.  Polling in 2010 by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found that majorities of Americans favored creating a standing UN peacekeeping force (64 percent), giving the United Nations the authority to enter countries to investigate human rights violations (72 percent), creating an international marshals service with the power to arrest leaders responsible for genocide (73 percent), and empowering the United Nations to regulate the international arms trade (55 percent).

Overall, as public opinion studies show, Americans want a smaller—rather than a larger—global footprint for their nation.  According to a 2010 poll by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, only 8 percent favored the United States playing the role of the preeminent world leader, while 71 percent favored a cooperative approach.  Gallup polls have turned up similar results.  In 2011, Gallup reported that only 16 percent of Americans endorsed the option of the United States playing “the leading role” in world affairs.  According to Gallup, 32 percent of Americans favored “a minor role” or “no role” at all for the United States, while 50 percent wanted the United States to “take a major role, but not the leading one.”

Much of this opposition to U.S. dominance in the world is undoubtedly based on distaste for the overseas U.S. military intervention of the past decade.  In recent years, polls have found substantial public opposition to the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  In 2010, a poll by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found that 79 percent of Americans agreed with the statement that “the U.S. is playing the role of world policeman more than it should.”

Of course, during the frenzy of an election campaign, it is tempting to whip up nationalist sentiment through high-flying rhetoric about an “American Century” and America’s allegedly unique virtue.  How many times have we heard, in these circumstances, that America is the greatest nation in the history of the world?  But, in the end, Americans might prove more committed to an internationalist policy than this year’s flag-waving politicians think.

Lawrence S. Wittner is Emeritus Professor of History at the State University of New York/Albany. His latest book is Confronting the Bomb: A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement (Stanford University Press).

Welcome the passage of Senate Bill 1867 and the police state.  No hearings were held and this passed under the guise of “our security.”Our government now has the right to detain and imprison American civilians indefinitely WITHOUT charges or due process.  Guilty until proven innocent is now the American way. This bill is the final step necessary to strike down any remaining Constitutional protections.

We have fusions centers all over the country gathering information on all citizens from all different sources.  These fusion centers have no oversight. Everythingyou do and own is tracked, including your financial transactions. We fear the IRS whose power is unrestrained in attaching citizens’ resources. We have FEMA camps that have been built all over the US, with barbed wire facing inward, guard station, restricted access, cameras, and plenty of coffins.  Sounds ominous, doesn’t it?

We have failed ventures (Solyndra) and illegal activities (Fast & Furious) being covered up, government officials taking advantage of insider information to enrich themselves.  All this is being done with OUR money.  These actions are all worthy of impeachment proceedings.

Where is the outrage? Nothing will change unless we clean out Congress and create TERM LIMITS to get rid of them.  We should be asking ourselves why does hardly anyone know about the Get Out of Our House (goooh.com) movement  which will allow us to do just that and why isn’t the press reporting on it?

K. Burson
Houston, Texas

Ann Teinaes’  animations in the Washington Post present a biting satire  of the news. No subject is off limits no politician is spared.

View her work here, cartoons are serious business. Be prepared to stay awhile, there are many pages.

Ann Teinaes

This was a very bad idea! The amount withheld from your paycheck (matched by your employer) is not a “tax,” but a contribution to your Social Security retirement benefits. If you don’t pay in during those quarters, it reduces the benefits you will receive upon retirement. Ask the Social Security Administration for a calculation of your estimated benefits (which are based on how much you pay-in) and you will see what I mean!

This “tax holiday,” like all holidays, costs you in the long run.  The reason that Social Security contributions were made mandatory was because a large portion of the population is too shortsighted to save for retirement on their own.  Where will your “stored harvest” be when you’re ready to retire?  That $1,000 per year that you don’t contribute today will mean money you won’t get tomorrow!

Furthermore, this “holiday,” in reality, further depletes an already broke system. And, by the way, now that we’ve experienced this “holiday,” how hard do you suppose it is going to be to re-institute this “non-tax”?

Do you see the absence of wisdom…Grasshopper?

Joseph Dion (Retired Attorney/CPA)
Masonville, Colorado