Letters for June 22, 2022
Coeur d’Alene
So North Idaho is in the national news again, not for its beauty or the wide range of activities, but for a motley gang of gay-and-gun fixated, Trump-worshiping “patriots” and their “pastor” backers.
Ted Wert
Sagle
A suggestion
As a naturalized U.S. citizen, I found it heartwarming to read the Spokesman article (“Newly minted citizens rejoice,” June 15) about foreigners being sworn in as new citizens during the naturalization ceremony at Avista Stadium.
Contrast their positive hopes and feelings for our country, including the anthem and flag, with the negative sentiments and actions of professional athletes like Colin Kaepernick, former San Francisco 49ers quarterback, and Gabe Kapler, current San Francisco manager, who have profited immensely from living here all their lives.
Here’s a suggestion for these critical guys (and like-minded teammates), go play sports abroad and tell us how that works out for you.
Joseph Harari
Spokane
Your stimulus checks came with a cost
What is the cause of inflation and who is to blame? Biden wishes to blame Putin. Certainly it is not hard to understand that a contraction in the supply of oil impacts the price of gas, but this is not technically inflation. Such supply and demand issues are constantly driving prices for millions of products, some up and some down. However, without an increase in the money supply, supply and demand for all products balance and overall prices are stable.
Milton Friedman famously said it best, “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.” This increase in the money supply is precisely what has happened with excess government stimulus, massive spending, and an endless appetite for even more spending with the Green New Deal and Build Back Better Plan, all purchased with new money supplied out of thin air compliments of the Federal Reserve (quantitative easing).
The issue is obviously very complex, and I believe the spenders in Washington like it that way so as to bamboozle the American people, spend whatever they like, and blame Putin. However; there is no doubt, government spending and borrowed money is to blame for our current inflation. Inflation is the government’s tax on you. They spend what they like and you pay for it at the pump and the grocery store rather than on Form 1040.
David Barnes
Spokane Valley
Jan. 6 hearing
How, perhaps the question is why, was one the most historic events in modern history, the Jan. 6 Congressional Hearings, not covered on the front page of this newspaper on June 10?
Mary Fagan
Spokane
Really?
Our nation came within a hair of loosing our republic and the best you can do is Page 9 (“Jan. 6 hearings open with focus on Trump’s role in Capitol riot,” June 10). Really?
We aren’t out of the woods yet. We have a whole group of folks that it is still OK to hang our vice president, that overturning an election is OK as long at it their election choice, that taking away election access for people of color, the elderly, the disabled is just fine, that the president who almost was successful in his coup attempt is being considered as the Republican candidate in 2024.
At what point is this important enough to actually call out Fox News and Newsmax for not even making an attempt at coverage of these hearing. May I remind you that Benghazi hearings went on was reported on for weeks when there really wasn’t any there there.
Have you no shame?
Allison Sharp
Spokane
Monaghan statute
The big lie – activists claim there is an “eyewitness” to atrocities committed by U.S. Naval forces in Samoa. The Monaghan statute represents these past “atrocities.” They want it gone.
Their eyewitness is Fanny Stevenson who writes about the civil war. She describes, “shells bursting everywhere; the cries of the bedridden and the helplessly wounded burning alive in their blazing houses. Mangled children crawling on the sands.”
Eyewitness accounts, must be true, remove the racist statute. Who wants a monument to genocide, war crimes? No one I know of – except, this claim of an eyewitness is false.
That makes it dangerous.
There is no eyewitness.
Where was their eyewitness in 1899? More specifically, where was Mrs. Stevenson on April 1, 1899, the day Monaghan died in battle?
Not in Samoa.
Mrs. Stevenson, their “eyewitness,” put her land and house up for sale then left Samoa almost two years before the war that killed Ensign Monaghan. She was no eyewitness to anything the U.S. Navy did in 1899, could not have seen the U.S. bombardments in Samoa, could not have witnessed to the killing of the “bedridden” and children by U.S. forces.
This lie of U.S. war atrocities, propagated by activists, echoed throughout their campaign, repeated in news reports, stated in their online petition is – deceitful and intentional.
The online petition to remove the statute is fraudulent. There is no eyewitness.
Warren Walker
Spokane