I'm working on a letter and/or statement to my congressman (if he ever has a town hall)
Critiques and corrections are welcome:
Dear Congressman Garrett:
I am a Democrat living in the 5th district. Although I didn’t vote for you, you hold tremendous power over my life. I serve my community through my church as a Stephen Minister and Presbyterian elder, by financially supporting Lake Christian Ministries, volunteering through Neighbors Helping Neighbors, and at my job by providing speech and feeding therapy to infants and children through Early Intervention. I live as a Democrat as a productive citizen in the midst of my Republican neighbors, friends, and my Republican husband, and some of the time, I believe what can unite us is greater than what divides us.
I have many concerns, too many to discuss here. Here’s one concern I have that affects all of us. Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, has made it clear that he wants to dismantle Social Security insurance and Medicare insurance, referring to the benefits citizens have paid into our entire lives as “entitlements,” as though that’s a bad word. We are entitled to the benefit program we have paid into our entire working lives because we had an agreement with the United States government that if we paid into these insurance programs, then we would be at least partially insured from birth to death from certain poverty and catastrophic medical bills.
My Grandma Frances, who lived to be 100, worked from age 40 when she was widowed until age 80 at a minimum wage job, and while she had no pension or an abundance of savings, she had Social Security to keep her out of poverty and help pay for her medical needs into her old age. Speaker Ryan collected Social Security benefits from age 16 through 18, saving that money to help him pay for college, because his father died when he was a teen.
I’ve been paying into Social Security and Medicare since I was 15 years old – that’s 44 years of payments. Now, I’ve heard the rhetoric that Social Security is going to run out of money, and that the money would be better off invested in Wall Street. Neither of those opinions is true. We can make Social Security and Medicare financially solvent by raising the salary cap, taxing capital gains, and by placing a minuscule transaction fee on stock trades. These are just a few ideas. I think smart minds can come up with other ways. Do you agree with Speaker Ryan that a voucher system, or means testing, or giving our hard-earned, safe money to Wall Street would better serve your constituents?
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