Readers respond to the recent announcement that the government won’t pay compensation to women affected by the rising pension age
I’m furious at the government’s decision to ignore the advice of the ombudsman and refusal to compensate Waspi women (Anger greets UK government decision not to compensate ‘Waspi women’, 17 December
). What’s the point in having a lengthy and expensive review if you don’t pay it any heed? I along with many others have been waiting a long time to hear what our compensation would be, even though it would go nowhere near the £50,000 many of us lost. I didn’t imagine they would so easily dismiss our suffering as a result of government failure to give us time to plan. Labour has already removed the winter fuel allowance. One wonders what it will hit us with next.
When you’re close to the edge of a precipice, every kick brings greater jeopardy. It’s almost as if they want pensioners to suffer, that we are their scapegoats. This is a last straw for me when it comes to Labour. I will never trust it with my vote again. I’d leave the country and go and live close to my daughter in New Zealand, but I can’t because the government then freezes your pension and you’re effectively worse off every year. I wrote to the pension minister about that, but it seems I’m not even important enough to warrant a reply. Maybe the government thinks we don’t matter because we’re not powerful, or that we’ll be gone before too long. It underestimates us. Cathy Preston Heathfield, East Sussex
Lynne Kirwin
mentored me as a student volunteer at the Young Vic in 1971, and her encouragement set me on course to work in professional arts management. We became colleagues at the National Theatre when Peter Hall was director, and then consultants on his subsequent launch of the Rose Theatre in Kingston.
Houston Texans
quarterback C.J. Stroud was distraught after witnessing teammate and friend Tank Dell suffer a gruesome leg injury during the team’s loss to the Kansas City Chiefs on Saturday afternoon.
The injury, which is expected to be season-ending, had a visible impact on the team and Stroud.
The second-year quarterback was brought to tears and had to be consoled by his other teammates.
When asked after the game how he was able to recover from the heartbreaking scene, Stroud spoke about his faith.
“All you can do is really pray. At the end of the day, God still gets the glory. Always, no matter what happens to me, I always know that I’m even up here because of the grace of Jesus and the grace of who He is in my life and Tank’s life. For anything how it goes, left or right or up or down, I always have to praise my Lord and Savior.”
“It’s not easy to move on and just keep playing, but I tried to do as best as I could,” he continued.
The Texans gathered around Dell and prayed before he was taken off the field in a covered medical cart. Stroud revealed what they prayed for
.
“Jesus,” he said simply. “Just finding him in this moment – it’s not easy to. He’s the Prince of Peace so I just prayed His peace over Tank’s head and his mental, his physical. We serve a miraculous God and I believe in healing and I pray that the Lord can heal him.”
Saturday’s injury marks what will likely be the second season-ending injury for Dell. His rookie campaign was cut short when he fractured a fibula in a Week 13 game against the Denver Broncos last season.
Dell was injured while hauling in a 30-yard touchdown pass at the start of the second half. He was taken to the University of Kansas Medical Center, where the team said he would remain overnight.
Trump probably doesn’t realize it or understand it, but the goals of some of his policies conflict with each other. In fact, if some of his policies are put into effect, others will not be possible. Important parts of Trumps ideology include tariffs and deporting immigrants. Yet at the same time, he wants to cut inflation and spur economic growth. The first two policy goals are antithetical to the last two.
Trump also does not take into account that the American population is aging and many of the elderly need fulltime help. We are not replacing our population with our birth rates declining. To maintain our economy and production ability, we need immigrants. Skilled, H1B immigrants are particularly important. Asylum for immigrants from totalitarian states is also part of our tradition.
Raising tariffs on imported goods will raise prices for consumers and be inflationary. Trump thinks that the exporting countries will absorb the costs, but they will actually be borne by American consumers. As the prices increase, so will inflation. Trump also believes that the funds collected from tariffs will allow tax cuts (mainly for the wealthy). But there will not be adequate amounts of money generated with tariffs to significantly reduce taxes without increasing the national debt, which is already higher than it should be related to our GDP.
Deporting immigrants will also spur inflation and will not provide jobs for Americans which is another of Trump’s goals. Immigrants tend to have low-paying jobs in the agriculture sector, landscaping, construction and meat preparation and packing. They also work as home health aides. Aside from construction, Americans will not take the jobs that become available. However, the prices of agricultural products and meat will rise, landscaping and construction will become more expensive, adding to inflation and there will not be enough home health aides.
Tariffs as a means of raising revenue go back to the 18th century, which is probably where Trump would like to see America. Not only should Trump not cut taxes when our national debt is so high, he should raise taxes on his billionaire friends and plug tax loopholes. There should be no increase for the average taxpayer. Closing the border aside from legal immigrants is a reasonable idea and some deportation of immigrants with no skills may be worthwhile. But we need immigrants to make up for our population losses. Tariffs should also be restricted to specific cheaper items that will compete with American goods.
www.robertlevinebooks.com
Buy The Uninformed Voter on Amazon, Barnes and Noble or your local bookstore.
Posted at 10:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tags: 2024 election, American work force, deport immigrants, economy, immigrations, tariffs, Trump
Former Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ) said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” that Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk’s influence over President-elect Donald Trump had a “self-life.”
A woman in Florida has discovered an unusual way to brighten her life
and save quite a lot of money at the same time.
It just means deciding to frequent some places that many others won’t.
Melanie Diaz of Tampa, Florida, finds some of the magic of Christmas
after others have tried to trash perfectly good — and brand new — holiday decor items. (See the video at the top of this article.)
The 20-something goes dumpster diving in the outdoor receptacles located behind retail outlets to find her treasures.
She’s saved as much as $20,000 by retrieving gifts and decor from trash cans, including wreaths from Michaels and toys from TJ Maxx, news agency SWNS reported.
The 22-year-old does her trash-to-treasure work in December and January and plucks out discarded holiday items
that would otherwise go to waste.
“It is my favorite time going dumpster diving on Christmas because they start throwing out a lot of Christmas stuff,” she told the outlet.
“I love saving everything so I can put it in my house
and decorate it for the next year.”
She finds the dumpsters that are placed behind such popular retailers
as TJ Maxx, Burlington, Michaels, Jo-Ann Stores, Pop Shelf and Home Goods — and said she’s found a jackpot of holiday items.
Some of her biggest discoveries occur after Christmas, she said, when stores begin clearing out their leftover holiday inventory.
“My biggest finds are in January,” Diaz told SWNS.
“I went dumpster diving to the TJ Maxx store, and I found a lot — the dumpster was full to the top.”
She has also retrieved puzzles and dog toys from TJ Maxx, saving around $200 each, and countless other holiday staples, including ornaments and stockings, SWNS reported.
Sometimes there’s so much to grab, Diaz said, that she has to enlist help.
She’s had to “bring my family to help me because it was too much,” she said.
DNC finance committee member Lindy Li said Friday night that President Joe Biden came out in support of banning members of Congress from insider trading this week because he still has a “bone to pick” with former Democratic Speaker of the House Rep. Nancy Pelosi.
Pelosi
was reportedly behind an effort to force Biden to drop his reelection bid in July. According to Li
and others, the president and First Lady Jill Biden aren’t ready to let that go.
While members of the House and Senate are legally permitted to trade stocks, Biden
told Faiz Shakir of More Perfect Union he chose to never own stock during his four decades in the Senate and why.
“I don’t know how you look your constituents in the eye and know because the job they gave you, gave you the inside track to make more money,” Biden said
. “Nobody in the Congress should be able to make money while they’re in the Congress.”
Pelosi has amassed a massive fortune during her decades serving California in the House from the market. According to Investopedia, she is worth
a reported $240 million, most of which came from “investing in lucrative tech stocks.”
On Friday’s edition of Fox News @ Night, host Kevin Corke asked a panel to discuss a Daily Mail report from Emily Goodin that claimed Jill Biden was feeling “vengeful” as her husband’s presidency entered its final days. The report further claimed she was urging him to “burn the whole thing down” before leaving office.
Corke asked Li to quickly respond to Goodin’s report. She replied:
She’s totally right, and we can see that happen when Joe forcibly came out and cited insider trading. It took him 50 years to get to that point, but you know why he did that? Because he still has a bone to pick with Rep. Nancy Pelosi. He’s still very angry that he got summarily pushed aside, and he’s finally saying that no one in Congress should be able to trade on the inside information, and you know who’s notorious for that? Nancy Pelosi.
As regulars are well aware, I did not vote for Donald Trump to be President. Indeed, I’m 0 for three on that score, having voted for his Democratic opponent in 2016, 2020, and 2024 despite having voted Republican in all eight previous presidential elections for which I was eligible. Nonetheless, I have expressed my frustration multiple times since the election that President Biden, whose administration was soundly defeated* in the election, has used the lame duck period to “Trump proof” the government, rushing to carry out policies that the voters just rejected** and endeavoring to make it harder for the victor to carry out the policies he was elected to enact.
This, however, goes both ways. We only have one President at a time and Trump is currently interfering with the affairs of state in ways I find quite problematic. While I find it unseemly, I don’t much mind that foreign heads of state are flocking to Mar a Lago to kiss the ring; the leader of the free world needs to be able to hit the ground running and establishing relationships and setting expectations during the transition enables all concerned to plan for the future. But, to take the latest example, intervening at the 11th hour to scuttle a budget deal
that would have kept the government running during the holidays is not something a President-Elect should be doing.
Ultimately, while I believe both Biden and Trump are violating longstanding norms, the problem is the absurdly long transition period between administrations. Trump was elected on November 5—over six weeks ago. He won’t be sworn into office until a month from tomorrow—a day short of 11 weeks after the election. (And, yes, I’m fully aware that the inauguration was in March until the passage of the 20th Amendment in 1933.)
By comparison, our cousins across the Pond manage to get a new PM clapped into 10 Downing in as little as two days after an election. France, which also has a presidential system (although a very different one) executes the transition in less than a week.
Certainly, it would take some planning to make our transitions faster. It would, for example, require candidates to announce their intended nominees for major cabinet posts ahead of time so that they could be vetted and confirmed quickly. But the current system is not only wildly undemocratic but creates truly perverse incentives.
*I’m aware that, as laggard states slowly counted their votes, the margins shrank considerably from what they appeared to be on Election Night. Trump appears to have won slightly less than a majority of the vote. Nonetheless, he swept all seven of the “swing states” that both candidates spent most of their resources on and made gains over his 2020 totals in virtually every county in the country.
**Parsing voter intentions when there is a binary choice is, to be sure, complicated. I voted for the Democratic nominee in the last three elections despite having significant policy disagreements with each of them; presumably, a lot of folks who voted for Trump disagreed with him on some issues. Regardless, he made his stance on immigration, Ukraine, and several other issues rather clear for a very long time.
