Letters to the editor — May 8

Your views

• Published May 08, 2008

We don’t get to vote on big ticket items

The Olympian publishes many letters by people who feel overtaxed and vent their rage on school levies.

Let’s put this in context.

The National Priorities Project (www.costofwar.com) keeps track of what the Iraq War is costing — more than $500 billion thus far ($341.4 million per day). This is $1,721 per person in the U.S.

NPP breaks the cost down geographically. Thurston County’s taxpayers have already paid $428.3 million for the Iraq War.

The March 23 Olympian’s headline bragged that the Port of Olympia made $400,000 in 2007 shipping military supplies for this war. Actually the war has cost our county’s taxpayers 1,000 times as much!

In contrast, the Olympia and North Thurston school levies — at roughly $20 million each — are miniscule compared with the $438.3 million our county’s taxpayers have spent for the war.

I’d like to vote YES for the school levies and NO for the war — and NO for Bush’s next generation of nuclear weapons, NO for wildly inflated contracts for Halliburton and Blackwater, NO for flying innocent people to Guantanamo and secret sites to be tortured, and NO for illegally wiretapping our phones and reading our e-mails.

But we never got the opportunity.

The system doesn’t let us vote on outrageous, immoral big ticket items. People who feel abused are allowed to vent only by punishing schools, libraries, fire stations and local government services that help us.

The military-industrial complex has a pretty slick deal going!

Glen Anderson, Lacey

In a fire, don’t rely on divine intervention

I had to read the article entitled “Neighborhoods without hydrants” a number of times before I could believe what I was reading.

I understand if a developer or a representative of the homebuilders association makes statements like, “It’s just not practical” to install fire hydrants supplied from wells. With them the bottom line is profit and their responsibility ends when the home is sold.

But when the county administrator and fire marshal make statements like “I think it would be very difficult to raise that as a policy issue,” and it’s “complicated and expensive,” that is something else again.