Letters to the editor for Friday, Nov. 27, 2015

Background check initiative must go down

Soldiers slaughtered on U.S. bases and a recent series of anti-Christian murders are precursors to our own Paris-style attacks. Anti-gun hysterics, note when the inevitable happens that your puppet master, billionaire Michael Bloomberg and his family won’t be trying to squeeze under that theater seat next to you because his armed guards will protect them.

With Obama inviting military-age Middle Eastern males and other foreign criminals into America, we must defeat Nevada’s upcoming universal background check voter initiative and all other attempts to impede our access to an effective means of self defense.

Lynn Muzzy

Minden

What’s the Social Security investment alternative?

The amount of misinformation that passes for intelligent commentary regarding the Social Security Fund is astonishing. In the Nov. 15 Appeal, Mr. Feldstein reveals, as if it were a crime, that the U.S. government has borrowed $150 billion from the Social Security Fund. Perhaps a more accurate report would be that the Social Security Fund has loaned the U.S. government $150 billion.

It would be fiscally irresponsible for those in charge of the Social Security Fund not to invest the money. The U.S. government pays interest on the money it borrows. This lending of money to the U.S. government is the exact same course of action that non-governmental pension funds follow.

What is the alternative? Perhaps a warehouse of hundred dollar bills, which would be losing money to inflation rather than gathering interest by being invested in government securities?

What better investment than U.S. government treasury notes? Over the years, we have heard ignorant politicians speak of a “lock box” for Social Security. What exactly would that look like? We have also heard complaints about the Social Security Fund being a file drawer of government IOUs. Again, what is the alternative? Billions stashed away in paper currency? This is absolute stupidity. A U.S. one hundred dollar bill is an IOU. It makes no difference if the Social Security is in government IOUs or hundred dollar bills, except that one draws interest and the other does not. The value of either is the same, and backed by the U.S. government.

James Sadilek

Carson City