Health care reform would instill laziness
The new health care bill does not make any sense to me at all, and I will tell you why. The first and most important reason is that I do not see why I should spend my money I work hard for on other people who cannot afford health insurance. Between food stamps and welfare, we are becoming a very lazy nation where people do not have to worry about themselves.
They no longer have to work to maintain a living. They could sit at home and have the government send them a check every month and call that good. Now it may not be the best style of living, but they have no incentive to work hard and experience success because they will get by with less or no work involved. If the government provides health insurance to the American citizens, it will only make the country even lazier by not forcing them to work for anything.
I firmly believe that it does more harm than good when we supply people with everything they need and they do not have to work for anything they do. If our government supplies insurance to everyone who cannot afford it, it invokes laziness in our fellow Americans, which is just one more thing they will not have to work for.
I would not like my taxes to be raised an incredible amount just to pay for other people’s insurance. To get an idea of how much taxes will be raised, the total cost of the bill is said to be around $871 billion over the next decade but is estimated at over $1 trillion by some experts. Four billion dollars of this cost will come from taxes put on patients who use medical devices like MRIs and CT scans. Also, $2.3 billion dollars would come from taxes placed on prescription drugs, and $544 billion will come in the form of a new income tax. The rest of the money needed will come from taxes put on patients with high health care expenses and patients who require high cost procedures. All this information can be found for yourself on www.heritage.org.
I think there are better ways we can help our fellow Americans, but I do not believe providing free health care to our neighbors is the right thing to do. I would rather pay for people to learn a trade or something that will help them become a valuable member of society and not just keep giving them hand outs.
David Ketcham
FreshmAn Accounting major
Learning a second language is overrated
This letter is in response to the Oct. 22 editorial written by Lacey Mason regarding educating titled “Foreign language should be taught at elementary level.”
I took four years of Spanish in high school and got by just fine in the class, but I personally think learning a second language is way overrated. If you think about it, there is no need for an American citizen with a college education to ever learn a foreign language. This is because every other nation in the world is already learning a second language, and that language is English. You write about Finland in your article being incredibly bilingual, and it’s true they are, but what you fail to realize is they have to be because no one else in the world speaks Finnish! That point applies to the majority of other languages in the world, too; nobody speaks them except for the native country.
This is why English is the number one second language in the world and why we, as a predominately English speaking country, don’t need to learn second languages.
It would be absurd to subject elementary level kids to a foreign language when most of them are already having a hard enough time reading English! You bring up statistics about how speaking two languages improves test scores and increases language proficiency, but personally I think test scores at such a young age are incredibly overrated. Also, what the hell is “language proficiency?” I tried to look it up, but I couldn’t find a set definition or standard, probably because there isn’t one.
Chris Marlow
Freshman General Studies major
7 comments
I don't even know what to say to Chris. The fact that you didn't understand the terms 'language proficiency' is sad, that you couldn't manage a proper google search is even sadder. The answer is there, very easy to find. You're a college student, research harder. As for the second language argument...well, there have been tons of studies proving the benefits of being bilingual. What makes your opinion more valid than actual research by people who know what they're doing? It just sounds like you're lazy, to me. I might be wrong, but if that's not the case then you really failed to support your point correctly.