Don't cut education funding
To the Editor:
I understand that Governor Gregoire is proposing to reduce the amount of money going to some school districts through equalization, because the state is short of money.
Our children are our future! Cutting spending on their education will cost us significantly more money in the future, when they end up in the justice system instead of the higher education system. If our children are not adequately educated, they will not be paying taxes to fund our government in the future. We are on a race to the bottom, educationally.
Schools are the last place that state government should be reducing spending. It does not make long-term economic sense.
Sylvia C. McFarland
Goldendale
Health care cuts could be disastrous
To the Editor:
In order to address the worst recession in 80 years, the governor has proposed enormous cuts to the health care system and health care for our most vulnerable residents. These cuts threaten quality health care services for everyone in the state. Under her proposal, at least 85,000 more people would become uninsured. She also stated, however, her commitment to repairing the worst health care cuts through new revenues.
Specifically, the governor's budget proposal:
• Slashes support for hospital care for low-income and disabled families and children by five percent (on top of a four percent cut last year), destabilizing the hospital safety net.
• Forces 67,000 low-income working adults off health insurance through the elimination of Basic Health, the state's only health insurance program for low-income working adults.
• Breaks a commitment to cover all children by 2010 with a sharp reduction in eligibility for Apple Health for Kids, and jettisons nearly 20,000 kids from insurance.
If the health care cuts as proposed were enacted, all Washington residents would feel the impact:
• At least 85,000 vulnerable children and adults would become uninsured-virtually overnight. This means emergency rooms would become significantly more crowded, with longer wait times for everyone.
• Hospitals would be forced to increase costs for businesses and employers who provide health insurance to cover the rate cuts for state-insured patients.
• Many children and adults would not be able to get treatment for their health needs, including communicable diseases that can be easily spread to others.
• Hospitals would be forced to cut important-but money-losing-programs their communities rely on, including mental health services, free cancer screenings, and immunization outreach.
Cassie Sauer
Seattle
FIT device huge help for fire fighters
To the Editor:
What a great community to be part of!
Due to the generosity of the people of Klickitat County, the money in the fire victims fund is doing what it is supposed to do. The fund has helped several victims of fire and has made it possible for us to purchase items needed by the departments to make us better fire fighting units.
The latest purchase is an amazing device that is capable of eliminating fire almost completely by itself. It is called a FIT (Fire Interruption Technology) device. It has been described as the next step in fire fighting technology and has already saved millions of dollars in property that would have been lost otherwise. The device can save property and make a dangerous job a little safer.
The local departments involved in the fire victims fund-Rural 7, Centerville, and Goldendale-will each receive one of these devices.
We are grateful to the people who donated to the fund in order to allow us to purchase tools such as this, which make the entire community a little more secure.
Leo Spencer
Goldendale
The moral use of robotics in war
To the Editor:
It is unsettling to realize that we on the political left often commit the same grievous error we so deplore in those on the extreme right: black and white thinking. With our concern for protecting human life and requiring impartial justice, we too find it difficult (or "unnecessary") often to subject ourselves to dispassionate analysis of the very world problems we most care about.
Consider our country's increasing use of robotic devices, including arms and unarmed aerial drones, in the Middle East. To escape the trap of black and white thinking, it is essential to keep in mind at least three things. First, there are nearly a hundred different kinds of robotic vehicles currently deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some of these devices are designed to target broadly and some very selectively. Some are employed under restrictive operational protocols and others without much regard for loss of human life, combatant or civilian.
Second, conditions change on the battlefield. What today might be considered a morally legitimate use of a robotic device may be regarded less so as the battlefield conditions and location change. So the moral use of any device depends on weighing its specific advantages against its disadvantages at any one time and place-plus how restrictively it is used.
Third, to take any moral position on the use of such robotic devices requires you to be clear on what "good" you have in mind. If it is the saving of human life and the lessening of suffering, then whose life and whose suffering? Or is it "winning" the war in, or the rapid withdrawal from, the Middle East? It makes a difference!
David C. Duncombe
White Salmon |
