GOP politics around vaccine mandates are evil
Two recent headlines present a contradiction in logic and just plain common sense: “660,000 lost” (to COVID) and “Georgia GOP ready to fight Biden’s vaccine mandate.”
Vaccines and masks are incontrovertibly the way to stop more deaths, yet I wonder by what moral compass the GOP is operating. If a vaccine mandate is an infringement on personal liberty worth fighting over, how does the GOP feel about other mandates and laws that we have all accepted now?
Should we now object to childhood vaccinations for smallpox? Can we now breeze through stop signs because having to stop is an “infringement on our personal liberty? Should we be free to light up a cigarette while standing in a checkout line? Turning a critical health issue (660,000 deaths) into a political football is more than reprehensible. It is evil.
JOHN POOLER, DORAVILLE
Raising the debt ceiling won’t solve country’s fiscal problems
Janet Yellen’s call to Congress for an immediate increase of the debt ceiling, without condition, is the opposite of what is needed.
“Unsustainable” is the word regularly and consistently used by the CBO, the GAO and every credible financial organization to describe the finances of the U.S. government. Total debt is now closing in on $29 trillion. The greatest annual revenue ever raised (in 2019) was $3.5 trillion. A $1 trillion deficit was run then. The pandemic has been used to generate a spending spree and Ms. Yellen has, like Jerome Powell, morphed into a big government bureaucrat whose only goal is to keep the party going. Last year, quantitative easing created money at the rate borrowed. Now, we’re back to $1 trillion per year. Printing money hasn’t worked in the other countries in which it has been tried.
What is needed are concrete proposals that work, such as gradually moving the Social Security and Medicare ordinary eligibility date to age 70 and then indexing it every decade for changing life expectancy. No one in either major party is proposing anything to fix the problems. We should credit Paul Ryan for having proposed something to cure Medicare’s financial woes.
ALLEN BUCKLEY, ATLANTA
