Larry’s latest letter to The Chronicle
Larry’s latest letter to The Chronicle
by Larry Kerschner, received January 8, 2018
It is long past time for voters of the 3d Congressional District to wake up and make a change. Jaime Herrera Beutler clearly genuflects at the altar of Pence/Trump and Big Money. She voted in favor of the greatest transfer of wealth from the lower class to the upper class in the history of the world.
We need to call her out on her statement about the recent corporate tax giveaway bill which she whole-heartedly supported. Herrera Beutler defends her tax vote, touting an estimate “that a family of four in Southwest Washington making $83,874 will save $2,385 annually under the new plan”. Since the average household income in Lewis County is about $44,000 per year (with 2.53 persons per household) she clearly is not talking about her constituents in this county.
It looks to me under the new tax plan the average person in Lewis County (where 14.7% live in poverty) there will essentially be no tax savings initially and by 2021 there will be a tax increase. Meanwhile corporations and billionaires get permanent increased welfare from the government.
JHB just voted to give the wealthiest 400 families in the country (who yearly bring home on average $87 million) another million each year. Herrera Beutler, whose tax-payer supplied insurance paid hundreds of thousands of dollars when her baby was born with fetal anomalies, just voted to kick 13 million people off insurance in order to give her rich friends the above noted welfare. Because of this, premiums for those buying insurance is expected to rise by 10-20%.
Herrera Beutler appears to be in lockstep with the Republican plan to attack the “government give aways” of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Because the Republicans just created a $1.5 Trillion increase of the national debt by gifting the already rich, they will now say there isn’t enough money to provide “welfare” for children and the elderly. According to AARP, 57 million seniors and disabled who rely on Medicare will have their coverage slashed. AARP also finds that 1.2 million seniors will actually have an initial tax increase and eventually 5.7 million elderly Americans will have a tax increase. In order to try to hide the Congressional theft from the Social Security Trust Fund, they plan to start calling Social Security checks “government benefit checks”.
Herrera Beutler voted to leave intact rules that will let Trump write off his personal Boeing 757 jet and the bar tabs of corporate sales agents at resorts like Trump’s golf courses.
While I don’t have anything good to say about the national Democratic Party, locally we have four people who have thrown their hat in the ring to oppose Herrera Beutler. Any one of these four would be a vast improvement over JHB. Her corporate sponsors have already given her close to half a million dollars to finance her re-election. It is always difficult to kick out an incumbent but Lewis County cannot tolerate another two years of JHB ignoring the needs and voices of her constituents.The Chronicle