Agreement on Balancing the Federal Budget

Re Landmark Deal to Balance Budget Reached,” May 3: There’s an air of mean-spiritedness and nastiness blowing over the countryside. I’m really disgusted that the Republicans and apparently also President Clinton were able to sell senior citizens down the river.

The balanced budget agreement announced last week is a total affront to senior citizens everywhere. Consider the fact that Social Security benefits will be going down, that Medicare premiums will be going up and that health care services available to seniors will probably be fewer and fewer.

If the Republicans hadn’t convinced Clinton that a tax cut was so necessary, there might have been a simple solution to this problem. If taxes are cut an estimated $85 billion and if Medicare funding is chopped by an estimated $115 billion, one must ask whether seniors are suffering so politicians can balance the budget or whether seniors are suffering so that the Republicans can achieve their “wonderful” tax cut, which will ultimately benefit only the rich, not the common man.

KEN FEASTER

Colton

* I believe an argument can be made that a capital gains tax cut opens a grand loophole in the tax system. If I had a company with employees in a high tax bracket and I wanted to pay them more, I would offer them a minimum wage and find a way to pay the rest as capital gains. The only way to avoid this loophole is to have the capital gains rate at least as high as the highest tax bracket or tax capital gains as if it were wage income.

BILL TOMLINSON

Frazier Park

* Working-class Americans should raise a mighty ruckus regarding the $10,000 deduction for college tuition that has been proposed in our new federal budget.

In California, for example, the most recent U.S. News & World Report survey indicates that less than 5% of college students are actually enrolled in schools where tuition and fees come to $10,000 a year or more. Nationally, assuming the same enrollment proportion to hold, this kind of tax bonanza for rich kids and their families is bound to fuel resentment and bitterness, especially in a nation where the gap between rich and poor gets wider each year.

More help for working-class students in our high-enrollment, open-access community colleges, less coddling and stroking for our elitist country club universities: Doesn’t this make sense as an education policy for post-Cold War America?

ROBERT OLIPHANT

Executive Director

Californians for

Community College Equity

Cambria