Why A Free Press Is In The Constitution | Letters To The Editor

The free press is the only private business that our founders insisted on protecting in the U.S. Constitution.

Why?

Because they considered the watchdog media of the time, mostly independent newspapers and periodicals, to be the “Fourth Estate” or branch of their ideal system of government.

Thomas Jefferson was especially firm on this subject. Given a choice, he wrote, between living in a country that had government but no newspapers or a place that had newspapers but no government, he would assuredly choose the latter.

Jefferson didn’t just mean the media outlets that he liked. He meant a wide range of opinions, as in the free marketplace of ideas.

W. Rick Garr, Fort Lauderdale

Fact, fiction and Social Security

Donald Trump and Elon Musk are spreading lies about Social Security as a prelude to destroying the most successful government program ever enacted.

Social Security is not a Ponzi scheme, nor is it an “entitlement.” It is a contract working Americans have made with our government that has been honored for nearly a century. We contribute a portion of our paychecks to fund the program and the government uses that money to pay benefits to retirees.

Social Security is not “going broke.”

The Trust Fund has a $2.5 trillion surplus, ensuring full payment of benefits until 2037. After that, contributions from workers will be sufficient to fund nearly 80% of future retirees’ benefits. And there’s a simple way to address that shortfall: raise, or better yet, eliminate the payroll cap.

This would also address the deeply regressive nature of the payroll tax. Anyone earning less than the $176,100 cap has the full 6.20% payroll tax deducted from his or her paycheck.

Higher-income individuals are taxed at increasingly lower (and eventually vanishing) rates as their wages grow beyond the cap.

Someone earning $1,761,000 pays only 0.62% while someone earning $17,610,000 pays only 0.062%. Eliminating the payroll tax cap will ensure that everyone is contributing the same percentage of their income to Social Security.

The Democrats created Social Security. We will not allow it to be destroyed in order to fund more tax breaks for plutocrats and multinational corporations.

Michael K. Cantwell, Delray Beach

A fix for immigration

I have a fairly simple solution for the decades-old immigration problem.

Let us do what we have done before. If immigrants have been here for more than five years, have no criminal record, have been employed and are paying taxes (as most do), then make them legal.

They are already working here, and they want what our ancestors wanted — a better life for their kids.

The problem would finally be solved, saving billions and without disrupting millions of lives and the loss of all of our agricultural workers.

What’s the downside? And what are the alternatives? There’s nothing you can say about these people that wasn’t said about our ancestors. And don’t tell me your ancestors came here legally.

If they arrived here after passage of the 1924 law that established everybody except WASPs from England as “undesirables,” they came illegally. There was no enforcement mechanism. They became legal, either through amnesty or statutes of limitations.

David Kulick, Delray Beach

Trump, Musk and Fort Knox

So now our unelected President Elon Musk and his bumbling sidekick, who happens to “ceremonially” hold the nation’s highest office, want to tour the U.S. gold depository at Fort Knox, Kentucky.

This visit is ostensibly only to verify that the gold is still there. That’s fine, and it is probably within the bounds of the purported duties and rights of the President of the United States.

After they’re finished auditing the reserves in the vault, I would like to go there, too. If only to verify that the gold is still there.

Bill Longmuir, Margate

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