We’re headed for Soviet-style crash

With a Republican governor chasing illegal unemployed aliens and defending the profits of a greedy heath-care industry and a Democratic House speaker defending the statewide public-employee welfare empire and carrying water for an overbuilt gambling cartel, how can the poor over-taxed, under-served Rhode Islanders win?

In the face of exploding government deficits, 13 percent unemployment and sinking local business, the top political leaders of both major parties are oblivious to the imperative need for a major restructuring to save this state from bankruptcy.

This is so much like how the Soviet Union was 20 years ago. It crashed and burned and came apart. The question is who will come forward to put “Humpty-Dumpty” together again.

The time for studies is over. This tiny enclave of 1 million no longer needs nor can support 39 local city and town governments, a state bureaucracy suitable for Texas and a communist-era employee-welfare system.

Like the rest of us citizens it’s downsizing time for the good old Ocean State. I’m hanging out the help-wanted sign: “Public savior(s) wanted — now.”

Michael Young

Newport

Tax cars for health

There is a way to provide funding for catastrophic health insurance for all Americans.

Most Americans (and many illegal aliens), all companies and all government agencies (federal and local) buy liability insurance for the vehicles they own. Congress should pass a law putting a $100 surcharge on each insured vehicle. The number of insured vehicles (cars, trucks, buses, motorcycles, RVs etc.) in the United States is enormous. There could be 500 million vehicles in the United States.

This surcharge could raise $50 billion per year to pay for catastrophic health insurance for all Americans. Everyone would pay his share: government agencies, private companies and individual Americans.

Once everyone has catastrophic health insurance, the cost of regular health insurance would drop dramatically and make it possible for all Americans to insure themselves and their families.

The health-care reform bills now in Congress would not be needed. Competition across state lines for all health-insurance companies and malpractice-insurance reform would be the only reforms needed.

Kenneth Berwick

Smithfield

Goodbye, safe, clean prostitution!

About the General Assembly making indoor prostitution illegal: I must congratulate the members. They have taken prostitution from an indoor venue where it was sleazy but relatively safe, secure and clean, and returned it to where it should be: in the gutter!

T.R. Catanzarite

Riverside

Valet service at the V.A.

Being a disabled Korean vet, I and many of my comrades at American Legion Post 2 find the valet parking at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Providence wonderful. You’re right at the main entrance instead of hunting for a parking space forever.

Now that the construction is ending, so will valet parking. We wish somehow valet parking could remain.

Charles A. Tanner

West Warwick

A proposal to make spring training shorter

The major-league baseball season lasts late into fall. I suggest the following changes:

Players, nowadays, come into spring training in good shape, with most working out in the off-season. Hence, no need for six weeks of spring training. The players think it’s too long anyway.

Start spring training a week earlier (warm climate where they train) and cut it to five weeks. Just picked up two weeks.

Keep the regular season at 162 games. With the changes in spring training, the World Series, should it go seven games, would end before the end of October. Makes sense to me.

Philip A. Ayoub

Seekonk