A PERA bankruptcy will leave Colorado taxpayers holding the bag

Just a few years in the past PERA was flush with cash and more than solvent.  So why is it that, due to some incredible fiscal stupidity, the rest of us must now be saddled with an insolvent and potentially catastrophic financial disaster?

This is neither fair to the taxpayers of Colorado nor to the recipients of PERA. Why were these recipients taken completely out of Social Security?  Why were these earners allowed to retire years earlier than the rest of us on normal pensions and Social Security?

Perhaps the only answer is a bankruptcy, as has been suggested by other concerned citizens. I, like many others, would move out of this state if I were suddenly saddled with an enormous debt of this nature.  Wouldn’t you?

William F. Hineser, DPM Arvada

Too easy to blame guns when we no longer know right from wrong

Remember the old joke about the man who loses his car keys at night in his front yard and is searching for them at the end of the block under the street light?  His neighbor says to him, “Why are you looking here when you lost them in your yard?”  He says, “The light is so much better here.”

This analogy keeps popping up in my mind about the school shootings when the left blames the NRA and guns in general.  To me it is abundantly clear that we do need to have defenders in our schools – retired military or maybe retired policemen.  Plus it would be great to have some teachers (purely voluntary) who will conceal-carry.  A sheriff in Cincinnati let it be known (after the school shooting in Florida) that his office would train any teachers who came forward and wanted to get a concealed-carry permit.  He thought maybe 20 would be interested.  Three hundred applied right away, and they had to close the registration.  It was all they could handle.

Until we can “fix” the underlying problem with what has happened to our culture, we would be wise to take this needed precaution.  Mental illness is a problem, and I think it stems from no moral grounding, which is where we get our love for our fellow man, and our appreciation of ourselves – our appreciation of goodness.

In fact that concept of right and wrong is thoroughly dismissed in our schools today.  That all things are relative is now taught.  This trend started in the ’60s and now has reached a crescendo.  In the ’50s and prior to that, kids in some school districts carried rifles in their trucks in the rack behind them for target practice after school with a teacher.  Why were there no school shootings before the ’50s?

Roberta Sutton Evergreen

Remember James Watt? No thanks

(Re: “Coloradans in Congress press Zinke to go West with headquarters,” March 18.)

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke may be even worse on environmental policy than Ronald Reagan’s (Interior Secretary) James Watt. Only invite bona fide conservationists to move West to live or to protect Colorado’s grandeur and wilderness.

Ellen V. Moore Nederland

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