Letter to the Editor: Everyone is eating

By Sun Advocate

Editor:
The title of this letter is part of a direct quote from Secretary of State Colin Powell spoken on The Late Show with David Letterman on Thursday September 25, 2003.
The entire statement was: “Everyone is eating, town councils are in place throughout the country, and of all things, PTAs are forming. To put the new democratic government in place, the president (Bush) asked Congress for a supplemental financial amount.”
In case you don’t know, he’s talking about Iraq. My question is this. Why does everyone in Iraq get to eat on our money when we have people starving by the millions in our own country?
There was an article in the Salt Lake Tribune on September 14, 2003 by Terry Haven who is an Advocate for Children. In it she states figures from The American Community Survey that in Utah 13.1 percent of children live in poverty; and from The 2003 Measures of Child-Well Being that 50,000 of Utah’s children have no health insurance. I think you could conservatively multiply these numbers by 50 to get an idea of how many children this equates to nationally. The answer is 2,500,000 and that’s just children! Now figure in the adults and the number would probably rise to at least 20,000,000. That’s almost the entire population of Iraq.
President George W. Bush has turned a $280 billion surplus into a $480 billion deficit in three years. If the deficit stopped growing before you finish this sentence, our children will still inherit a $6 trillion national debt!
Secretary Powell said that Bush has a very good chance for re-election. If we reelect him, then we will deserve all the misery and poverty that will befall us. President Bush cares a great deal more about his status in other parts of the world than he does about the American people and it’s time that we all realize that.
We have millions of hungry and homeless, our insurance is unaffordable to most of us, our welfare system is a joke because of poor management and abuse, and our public education system is a shambles because of inadequate government funding. And these are not the only problems we face.
Granted, we Americans are a strong and determined people, but we can’t be expected to take care of all of our problems when our government chooses to abandon us for other parts of the world.
How’s your financial situation? How’s your peace of mind about your job (if you still have one) and your family’s well being?
The income taxes you pay should go a long way toward fixing what’s wrong in this country, but instead those dollars grow wings and fly to Iraq and other parts of the world. You get nothing out of them. The problem is your government lies to you about where your tax dollars go. If those dollars went where they should, we would not have one in every six children in this country going to bed hungry every night,
If you don’t mind seeing our money go to other countries while our children (and the rest of us) suffer, sit back and watch; but if you do mind, tell your government representative to speak for you. After all, that’s why we elected them.
If they won’t speak for us, then maybe it’s time we elected someone who will.