Firefighters, not columnist, have facts on their side
To the editor:
Let me open by saying that, while we have disagreed with much of the reporting that the Las Vegas Review-Journal has performed on the negotiations between professional firefighters and the various local government entities, the paper and its editors are to be commended for repeatedly allowing us to tell our side of the story. We believe the public's understanding of the issues has been somewhat improved as a direct result of the leaders of the Review-Journal making the space available.
Firefighters are fighting a tough battle. On one hand, we are trying to protect public safety, and our base pay of roughly $22 an hour (we don't make overtime policy). On the other hand, we have found ourselves subject to some of the most inaccurate reporting we have ever witnessed on a major story.
Jane Ann Morrison's columns of March 6 and July 1 mark a new low in coverage of our negotiations. In her columns, she claimed two firefighters came to the door of a friend of hers. He said they were canvassing the neighborhood, supposedly gathering signatures on a petition supporting city of Las Vegas firefighters, who were in contract negotiations at the time. These mystery firefighters supposedly sent a message with an underlying threat: "Sign here, or I'll let your house burn down." If true, this would be the most unprofessional conduct that a firefighter could be engaged in: using taxpayer dollars to make a threat.
Fortunately for the community and firefighters, not one word of Ms. Morrison's story was true. Ms. Morrison's friend later admitted to city of Las Vegas officials, who conducted an official audit based on Ms. Morrison's column, that he never saw any such thing.
Those official auditors also found that no one else in the neighborhood did, either. We can prove it. The lie was laid bare by the city audit.
The problem for Ms. Morrison's credibility is that she saw the results of that audit and then proceeded to knowingly reprint misinformation in her July 1 column. In that second column, she danced around the fact that every single portion of her friend's' story was proved false. She went on to imply that these fantastic stories had to be washed away as part of finalizing our contract negotiations. Nothing could be further from the truth.
All modern fire trucks have global positioning system technology. GPS data proved irrefutably that no truck was in the area of Ms. Morrison's friend. None.
Ms. Morrison used her position at the Review-Journal to try to get the entire community to believe her story. Incredibly, Ms. Morrison then fashioned a column linking the resolution of the inquiry to our contract negotiations.
Something is very wrong here. This is precisely the kind of inaccurate reporting that has cast firefighters in such a negative light. Jane Ann Morrison owes all city of Las Vegas firefighters a public apology.
DEAN FLETCHER
LAS VEGAS
The writer is president of the International Association of Fire Fighters Local 1285.
Road to disaster
To the editor:
In your July 4 front-page article, "Public employees' pay keeps rising," which covered a problem that is endemic across the country, it was disappointing to see that some people still just don't get it.
First, Las Vegas City Manager Betsy Fretwell made the unfounded statement that "we have a long history of having a few people doing a lot of work, and of paying them more because they do a lot." In effect, she is saying that government employees are harder-working and more efficient than private-sector employees. In fact, private businesses cannot afford to adopt the attitudes and inefficiencies of government employees, or they would be out of business.
Then the article quotes Mike Ward, research director for the Service Employees International Union of Nevada, who says we need more unions in the private sector to get more raises and other benefits for current nonunion workers. Yeah, that's a quick ride to disaster. I can't believe people can make statements like this and keep a straight face.
Our country is facing the greatest economic challenges since the Great Depression, and people like these two still want to continue on the road to disaster. The only bright spot in this country is in New Jersey, where the new governor is taking on these disastrous practices head-on, and winning. That is because the public is actually smarter than the politicians and government representatives give them credit for.
This is no time for our leaders to be disingenuous. Forget about getting re-elected and concentrate on what is needed to bring our country back to prosperity. When that happens, wages will take of themselves.
R. COLE
LAS VEGAS
Deficit spending
To the editor:
In response to John Brummett's July 4 column, "The virtue of deficit spending":
The disconnection on the cause of the economic crisis we find ourselves in is more fundamental than the disagreement on what to do about it. The lack of agreement is pretty standard when discussing many of the problems of our day.
My unsophisticated view on economic theory tends to fall into two camps: "Government/regulators know best," which would be the Keynesian viewpoint embraced by Mr. Brummett and Paul Krugman, and "Market knows best" represented by the Chicago and Austrian schools of thought and best represented by Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, both Nobel laureates in their own right. These two camps' understanding of the underlying causes is cogently laid out in the article "Primer on the Great Debate," by Richard W. Rahn. He gives a far better explanation than I ever could.
Mr. Brummett's assertion that President Roosevelt's attempts to rein in spending in 1938 caused a contraction in the economy is countered by Mr. Friedman's analysis (with co-author Anna Schwartz) in "A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960." They argue it was the disastrous policies of the Federal Reserve that allowed the Depression to start and then exacerbated it at every turn, including the recession of 1937-38.
Meanwhile, Mr. von Hayek agreed that once the Depression started, it was monetary policy that prolonged it, but it was the Fed policies prior to the Depression that made it possible.
Whom to believe? We have dueling economists with lofty credentials and accolades, so how do we decide what is the proper course?
How about the one that doesn't drive the national debt north of $19 trillion dollars over the next five years? How about the course that increases personal and economic liberty?
A lot of mainstream thought denies the existence of the business cycle or claims the ability to control it. Markets aren't mindless entities that can be coerced into following the bidding of some regulator or legislator. They are made up of people who will take what is presented to them and plot strategies that will maximize their own return, that will flow like water through sand to reach the point they were headed before encountering the obstacle.
If that happens to the detriment of the economy at large, like the mortgage morass? Markets may not be mindless, but neither do they have a conscience.
People care. Markets don't.
Nobody wakes up in the morning setting out to destroy someone else's wealth, but the law of unintended consequences usually means it's going to happen anyway.
Let's take a couple of seconds to at least try to agree on what the cause is of the thing we are trying to fix before flushing more of my money and any other taxpayer's money down the toilet with little hope of return.
Marcie Hansen
North Las Vegas
