Don't bring back military draft

Showing the same departure from reality as 60 years of Republican and Democratic administrations, a letter writer suggests a return to the military draft because "this would reduce unemployment and promote growth for the economy because these young men and women would be paying taxes" ["Reasons to return the draft," In My Humble Opinion, May 23].

A nation's wealth and expanding economy -- even one fully immersed in the information economy like China's and Singapore's -- is ultimately derived from the manufacture of goods, cultivation of agricultural products, and harvesting of natural resources like fish, whales, lumber and minerals, rather than from polishing boots and occasionally blowing things up overseas.

Unless the writer is proposing that conscripted men and women be put to work in factories, farms, fishing boats or mines, the taxes of the poor and unemployed will have to be raised to pay the salaries of all the new military personnel.

A military-centered economy? Isn't that what put the Soviet Union in its grave?

Paul Manton, Levittown