The national budget deficit: Where to cut?

I hate being a "baby boomer." Who is responsible for naming generations anyway?

I am sick of being stereotyped and having people speak for me and my generation as though they know what we want. I am especially irritated by columns like the one from Peter Goldmark ["A road to national economic health," Opinion, Jan. 16], proving he has no idea what it is to look for work in your late 50s and 60s. Raising the retirement age is nonsense, because there is no guarantee that there will be jobs for older workers in the future.

Furthermore, many of us have been laid off and forced into early retirement, whether we want to retire or not.

And on the subject of retirement age, first we were told that we all want to work forever. Now we're told that we all want to retire early and we are single-handedly going to destroy Social Security and Medicare.

What bothers me the most is that my generation has contributed heavily to advances in technology and products that helped build this country. Now we are accused of destroying what we helped build.

William Bertini

West Islip

More than 40 years ago, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. presciently said, "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."

In his opinion column, Peter Goldmark makes some wise suggestions about our national spending priorities, such as weaning our nation from foreign oil. But "trimming the rate of growth of entitlement programs, including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid," would only make the most vulnerable suffer even more than they are.

Two ideas - a Wall Street tax, and cutting our bloated military/war budget - would be fairer and more constructive.

A national tax of even a fraction of a penny on each dollar traded in stocks, bonds, derivatives and all other such financial instruments would generate hundreds of billions per year without hurting those already suffering.

The military budget can be scaled back to sensible levels of defense, instead of fighting endless, multi-trillion-dollar wars of aggression and occupation, adding more nuclear weapons to our arsenal of nearly 8,000 warheads, and maintaining an expensive empire of more than 800 U.S. military bases in nations all over the planet and nuclear-armed carrier task forces around the world. Only war profiteers and their congressional cronies benefit from such destructive expenditures of blood and dollars.

Ed Ciaccio

Douglaston