7-Year Federal Budget Plan

* The new game in Washington is the seven-year balanced budget. Of what value are budgets that will not be in balance for seven years, do not eliminate behind-the-scenes “off-budget” expenditures and will increase our national debt by $1 trillion during the seven-year period?

For 30 years we have endured yearly budget deficits that have forced us to borrow money to pay our bills. The total of this debt is now $5 trillion and it is costing $300 billion per year in interest .J.J. 20% of our total budget. Despite statements by our esteemed politicians, we will not have a balanced budget as long as this $300-billion-interest albatross is hanging around our necks!

So instead of budgets that will not be in balance for seven years, we need surplus budgets to eliminate the debt and stop the interest hemorrhaging. The only way to do this is to freeze the debt ceiling and eliminate the inflationary COLAs (annual cost- of-living adjustments). Anything less than this will be just more examples of deceit and trickery.

JOHN K. STODDARD

Palm Springs

* Here’s another fine mess the president and the Congress have managed to get us into. Both the president and the Congress should show a little more maturity than the proverbial 5-year-olds they seem bent on imitating. They are willing to shut down the government, or at least parts of it, over a squabble concerning economic projections looking seven years ahead.

That’s seven years. Ask any experienced economist, and he will be bound to admit that a one-year projection is about all he’d be willing to take seriously.

RONALD BENKERT

Marina del Rey

* I am old enough to remember the Great Depression-- in detail. If I thought that I would live long enough to collect on a bet, I would give odds that not one of the budget proposals on the table in Washington today would balance the budget by the year 2002-- or by any year thereafter.

The poor may not vote, but when the poor become desperate enough, they will be heard. And when the poor become desperate enough to be heard, the balanced budget will become the least of our concerns. We will be too busy trying to find another savior-- another FDR.

With a few exceptions (the Jewish communities in diaspora, for instance) the private sector has never met the charitable needs of any civilization. Here in the U.S. the private sector is not doing it now, never has and probably never will. That is, indeed, unfortunate because, until we drop this word “welfare” and rediscover the biblical concept of charity, this expensive, downward social spiral will continue.

LEW B. STEARNS

Pico Rivera