LETTERS: Voters can disassemble bureacracy

To the editor:

House Speaker John Boehner, with his recent tongue-lashing of conservative groups, has finally revealed what most of us voters, both Democrat and Republican, have known all along: There is not a dime’s difference between the leadership of the Republican establishment and the entire Democratic Party. They and their staffs, right down to the last bureaucrat entrenched in Washington, D.C., are there for their own selfish reasons.

These people value money over everything else, because it buys them the power to legislate where they want the money to be directed. They know full well what they are doing, and the people who vote to keep them in office have no idea of the grave consequences of their votes.

We as voters have the power to put an end to this. The solution is to not vote for the same politician whom you voted for in the previous election. We will flip the House every two years and the Senate every six years. In a short time, the bureaucracy will be disassembled as well. Then, and only then, will we be able to reverse this morbid path to financial ruin.

MIKE BRYANT

LAS VEGAS

Mega Millions

To the editor:

Once again, the Mega Millions lottery awarded a huge jackpot, this time for $648 million. And once again, the states that run the lottery benefited, with millions of dollars going to fund education. But in Nevada? No.

This state is under the thumb of the Adelsons, Wynns, Maloofs and Icahns, who are afraid that if a lottery is run in Nevada, they will lose some of their precious profits. This state is run not by the people in Carson City but by the owners of the hotels and casinos. They pay the lowest gaming taxes in the country and reap mega millions in profits, then use that money to invest in venues in other states and Asia.

Why doesn’t the state government institute a lottery? Because the politicians are afraid that if they run a lottery, the casino giants will cut back on their political contributions.

STEPHEN ROSIN

LAS VEGAS

Government engineers

To the editor:

There should be some way to get more engineering into our government. Right now, we are governed by lawyers and lobbyists. They pass and write thousands of pages of laws and regulations that they don’t read or even understand. And those in the mainstream media keep talking about it, but they haven’t read any of it, either.

For example, our government has dictated that cars must get better gas mileage, and it even subsidizes cars that run on electricity. But now they find that there aren’t enough gas taxes to maintain our roads, due to lower fuel consumption. Who could have seen that coming?

And they pass a monstrous health care law that supposedly gives health insurance to 30 million people who didn’t have it before. So the demand goes up, but there is nothing in those thousands of pages that increases the supply of health care providers, medical equipment and new drug discovery. The bill even adds taxes on medical equipment. So now we’re going to have long waits, stressed care providers, antiquated medical equipment and lots of anger. Who could have seen that coming?

And the young people, whom we have spent billions of dollars on, teaching them how (and what) to think, may discover that we’re saddling them with the largest generational theft in human history — $17 trillion in debt and at least $50 trillion in unfunded obligations.

Maybe engineers can’t fix this, either, but in the past 100 years, they have done some remarkable things. Maybe we should put a little systems engineering into the governing process.

CHARLES GOULD

LAS VEGAS