Obama only wanted to tax the rich Re: “An expensive tax cut deal,” Dec. 10 Diana Furchtgott-Roth gets it all wrong despite the fact that she is the “former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor” and now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, when she repeats: “Economic studies clearly show that tax cuts lead to more economic growth than do spending increases.”
Really! Any economic historian knows that from the 1940s to the middle of the 1970s, tax rates for the highest income groups reached 95 percent, with the average rate around 70 percent. Yet that period also registered the highest economic growth rates — more than 3 percent.
Making the ignorant masses believe that President Obama wanted to raise taxes for everybody, rather than only for the wealthiest Americans, is the biggest hoax perpetrated by rich Republicans in Congress. All the humming and drumming by them and the press will probably pay off — in exchange for letting unemployed folks hang on for 13 more months in jobless limbo and a further decline in Social Security revenues.
Ralf Hertwig
Springfield
State Department failed to secure messages
Re: “Protests, cyber-skirmishes rage over WikiLeaks arrest,” Dec. 10 The entire WikiLeaks fiasco could have been avoided had the people at the State Department encrypted their sensitive messages more than once. Electronic communications are encrypted for transmission, but human readable messages are exploitable once opened and read.
For example, your e-mail program is only as secure as your password. One bad password or one bad username can allow an intruder access to all your messages. Once in, all messages are readable, regardless of the electronic encryption which brought them to you.
Only double or triple coding can guarantee the message will not be decrypted.
J.V. Presogna
Portland, N.Y.
Panel votes to cut life-saving troop equipment
Re: “Now is the wrong time for budget cuts,” Dec. 7 Jed Babbin’s excellent column explained why President Obama’s debt commission report lacks the carefully considered analysis necessary to justify specific defense cuts. If Congress slashes funding for critical troop equipment as we fight two foreign wars, it will invite a scandal on the scale of the 2004 body armor crisis that cost thousands of lives in Iraq.
Yet Congress is already proposing such cuts. The House Armed Services Committee recently voted to cut nearly $1 billion out of the Brigade Combat Team Modernization’s next-generation surveillance and communications capabilities. With ground and aerial reconnaissance drones, remote sensors, and a mobile broadband network, a BCTM-equipped unit in Afghanistan could discover ambushes and defeat insurgents while avoiding civilian casualties.
The committee claimed that the advanced technology needed more testing. But preliminary reports from Fort Bliss indicate that the network is meeting connectivity targets and the aerial reconnaissance drones are highly effective in combat scenarios. Veterans say it could start saving lives today. Congress certainly would not wish to explain why it delayed the equipment.
Antonio Gil Morales
Past national commander,
American GI Forum of the United States
Fort Worth, Texas
