Letters 12-21-13

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It’s not just motorcycles that are loud

It’s not just motorcycles that are loud

In reading the two letters submitted by Gary Hattenburg and Gene Robertson regarding loud motorcycles, I would also like to add to the list cars and trucks that also have illegal muffler systems installed in them. The loud noise and impact on residential neighborhoods is horrific. Even when these vehicles leave the home occupied neighborhoods, you can still hear them roaring up or down Queen Kaahumanu Highway.

I, too, would ask, where is the local police department when all of these illegal noise machines are roaring along?

Barbara Hussey

Kailua-Kona

Information needs to be corrected

In response to Gary Hattenburg’s letter, which ran in West Hawaii Today Nov. 24, and regarding Bob Paddock’s letter, which was both incorrect and frivolous.

His statement that our government gave away about $23 billion to foreign aid is grossly incorrect. It was about $52 billion in 2012. Obama is also asking Congress for another $7 billion for improving his fatherland’s electrical systems. And then there is $139 billion being spent on welfare, and that doesn’t include food stamps. The total would amount to about 10 percent of the federal budget. Does anyone really believe that the head-of-a-household person with a family of four and earns $50,000 would give away $5,000 (Hattenburg’s so-called “lose change”) to charity and to his neighbors in order to win their friendship along with incurring an annual debt of $50,000 each and every year? If they did they will end up bankrupt just where our government is headed.

Mr. Hattenburg was not only wrong about these, he completely missed the point that Mr. Paddock was trying to convey in his letter, that “the government should run its affairs like a well-managed household.” If the government did, they wouldn’t be paying many times as much for things as they usually do, e.g. $1 billion for a software package that didn’t work, and then hiring the same people to do the same work and paying them again. Would any well-managed household pay again for something that didn’t work in the first place?

Any third-grader could have found these answers by simply going on the Internet, and any degree of thinking about this catastrophe is better than no thinking at all.

E. Horne

Kailua-Kona