Several weeks ago I corresponded with all of the federal legislators that represent our district. The subject of the correspondence was Minimum Required Distribution (MRD) from individual retirement accounts. With the financial market downturn in 2008 the federal government suspended the required MRD withdrawal in 2009. Since then withdrawals have been required. At end of 2011 the market had still not recovered and many individual retirement accounts were as much as 10 percent to 35 percent below their 2008 levels.

Military spending cuts

Today, Feb. 20th, there was an editorial in the Dispatch that tried to tie our economic success, or lack of it, to having military troops and equipment deployed here and around the world. The long and the short of it, when we are at war, we are creating jobs. I have long wondered when this argument would come out and now it shows how desperate that we are becoming. But it does bring out a truth we never could talk about before. That truth being that war is big business.

A Feb. 16 letter argues that teacher salaries are in an alternative reality that should learn to play by the salary rules of NFL players. In my view the writer has the importance of the two realities completely reversed. The absurd salaries of professional athletes could not exist if there were not a society affluent enough to support their entertainment industry. The foundation for a productive society is a service industry called education, which people don’t generally enter with any idea of becoming rich.

Everyone complains about the job market, but they do not do anything to change it. Our country needs jobs in the housing and construction market to get the economy going again, and I have a plan to help us achieve this goal... it’s called IRAD or Individual Retirement Account Diversification.

How about a stimulus program that the taxpayers don’t have to pay back? Unlike the government program we wouldn’t have to be concerned on how the money was spent.