Letter: Questions the direction of the country

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To the editor,

What is happening in our country?

Washington is asking senior citizens to take another cut in their benefits. Young men and women serve in the U.S. military for 20 years, risking their lives protecting freedom, and only get 50 percent of their pay. People are out of work and have finished collecting unemployment and haven’t any money for food or a place to live.

What is Washington doing? Are they taking a cut to help out with the debt?

Politicians hold their political positions and receive full-pay retirement after serving one term.

There are 435 congressmen, nine Supreme Court justices, 100 senators and one president. They do not receive social security, but are on an elite retirement plan that is not available to the people. We had to take a cut, but they received a raise.

Many citizens have no idea that members of Congress could retire with the same pay after only one term, and they have exempted themselves from many of the laws they have passed, while ordinary citizens must live under those laws.

They have also exempted themselves from the healthcare reform in all of its forms. Do we have an elite that is above the law?

These people have free medical coverage, and no one questions the doctor as to whether they need surgery, of if they are too old to receive treatment. The doctor doesn’t give them a pain pill and tell them they have to learn to live with their illness because the government will not pay the doctors to do the surgery that is needed.

Why is this happening? Because these 545 people want it that way. They should be accountable by the people who are their bosses.

We should vote all of them out of office and clean up this mess. Why is it that 300 million people can not replace 545 people of incompetence and irresponsibility?

I quote from a proposed 28th amendment to the United States Constitution, “Congress shall make no law that applies to the Citizens of the United States that does not apply equally to the senators and/or representatives; and Congress shall make no law that applies to the senators and/or representatives that does not apply equally to the citizens of the United States.”

All the taxes we pay did not exist 100 years ago, and our nation was the most prosperous in the world. We had absolutely no national debt. We had the largest middle class in the world, and mom stayed home to raise the children.

What is happening to our country? Are we just going to let these 545 people do as they please, or are we going to hold their hand to the fire and make them accountable to the people who put them in office.

Senior citizens are having a hard time making ends meet as it is. With more deductions it will be difficult for them to bread on the table.

People are losing their homes and all of their savings, but our government is giving money to other countries instead of helping their own.

Charity begins at home. Help our people first so that we can get back on our feet, then we can help others.

The 545 people in Washington should live just one year in our shoes, live the way we do on what we get from social security, what little pensions we have, what payments we have to make for medical care, etc. But, they will not do that. They are living the good life and do not want to look at what is happening around them.

Antoinette Cronin

Naugatuck