Tucson CitizenTucson Citizen

Letters to the Editor: Economic system out of joint

Stone-throwers build wall against progress

Re-employed workers helped build the human infrastructure of our national parks and forests in the 1930s.

Paths to Sabino Canyon and Mount Lemmon are still a treasure to our community.

The jobs to able-bodied unemployed people helped restore hope, reduce homelessness and put a few dollars in the hands of people who needed them desperately.

Those dollars were spent in an economy that needed spending.

The federal government invested in those people and reaped an enormous benefit.

Instead of filling Hoovervilles, we got taxpayers, trained to better perform labor, and more knowledgeable about our environment.

The community got roads, paths and dams providing access to nature’s beauty.

A deficit to finance tax breaks for second and third houses, yachts and accumulations of wealth for tax shelters such as the Cayman Islands robs our nation of wealth, and our taxpayers of value for their dollar.

Investments in our people, our environment and our infrastructure generate a great return.

Our economic system is now out of joint.

People need work and training; communities need infrastructure; children need education.

To stand by idly or throw stones at those who are trying to get the economy back in motion gets in the way of progress.

Let’s act as communities for the common good, not partisans hoping for increased power if things continue to go astray.

Barry Kirschner

attorney

City, don’t toss Hein on hiney – seat more pros

Re: the Tuesday editorial “Council shuns responsibility as city budget woes worsen“:

This editorial is right on.

The real challenge we face, however, is with who runs for local office.

Tucson doesn’t seem to have any “professionals” willing to enter the political arena.

The folks we’ve elected are generally decent and well-meaning, but they lack the major and extensive management skills that only come from spending significant time in the private sector.

Throw in the parochialism that seems to continually influence their thought processes, along with the poor voter turnout for local elections, and you wind up with “amateurs” tasked with making decisions regarding the operation of what is, in effect, a large corporation.

Before tossing Mike Hein out on his hiney, the council needs to be very wary of the potential consequences.

Any future manager worth his or her salt will do their homework and quickly realize that if they came here, they’d be working for the “not ready for prime-time players.”

Hein is the only “professional” decision-maker City Hall has right now.

Bob Lee

We can credit gov’t . . . for bad economic plan

I look across the country and see a great deal of hardship and misery due to financial stress.

So I devise a scheme to elevate some of the hurting.

My plan? I devise a method to gain access to the credit cards of every person in the country. I use these credit cards to provide goods, services and money to anyone I deem worthy.

Of course, what I am doing is not right or legal, so I am apprehended and put in jail.

The people I have helped are very happy, but the persons’ credit I used are devastated.

To me my plan does not differ from what our government is doing.

Some will be pleased, but most will be devastated and will lose many of their freedoms.

Ron Hessick

Columnist sticks neck out for stem cell study

Re: Andrea Sarvady’s Tuesday column “Woman to Woman: New stem cell policy spurs hope“:

A law named after my son Roman Reed funded the Keirstead research Sarvady referred to.

I want to thank her for being willing to stick her neck out on behalf of embryonic stem cell research.

The long letter she got attacking her positions is typical pseudo-science.

For example, the “adult stem cells from the nose” are quite probably not stem cells at all.

(Write Dr. Wise Young at the CareCure.org Web site for a scientific explanation.)

Also I have talked to several people who had that operation, and none would do it again.

Their improvements were minimal; their costs extensive.

Don Reed

Fresno, Calif.

Neither U.S. nor guns at fault, the users are

Mexico would love to blame all its problems on the U.S.

Mexico blames the U.S. because our country has so much more to offer that the citizens of Mexico are, in some cases, risking even life itself to partake of our bounties.

Now, Mexico is trying to blame the guns that are more readily available here than in their own country.

It is not the guns that are to blame for the violence in Mexico; those same guns are here in abundance, and criminals are not running rampant killing government officials wholesale as is the case in Mexico.

No, it is not the gun that is at fault; it is the people who get hold of them and it is the culture that exists in that country.

Eugene Cole

retired

Citizen Online Archive, 2006-2009

This archive contains all the stories that appeared on the Tucson Citizen's website from mid-2006 to June 1, 2009.

In 2010, a power surge fried a server that contained all of videos linked to dozens of stories in this archive. Also, a server that contained all of the databases for dozens of stories was accidentally erased, so all of those links are broken as well. However, all of the text and photos that accompanied some stories have been preserved.

For all of the stories that were archived by the Tucson Citizen newspaper's library in a digital archive between 1993 and 2009, go to Morgue Part 2

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