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Letters: Dropping Philadelphia's Deferred Retirement Option Plan is just the beginning for budget cuts

IT APPEARS that the mayor is ready to do the right thing and suggest that the city rid itself of the boondoggle that is the Deferred Retirement Option Plan. (And congratulations to the Daily News for its investigative reporting on this matter. It is, as you say, Our Money.)

IT APPEARS that the mayor is ready to do the right thing and suggest that the city rid itself of the boondoggle that is the Deferred Retirement Option Plan. (And congratulations to the

Daily News

for its investigative reporting on this matter. It is, as you say, Our Money.)

But the proposed cessation of DROP is only a drop in the bucket as far as waste, fraud and abuse is concerned. How the city has wasted taxpayer dollars are numerous and creative: improper bonus payments over years to library directors (more than $200,000), contracts for city employees with lifetime pensions after two years of service, contracts for services duplicated elsewhere, and the California dreamin' contract for the former Californian, our superintendent of schools, whose compensation may be acceptable on the West Coast, but far outweighs what our taxpayers can bear.

We are neither an ATM nor a cash cow for those who want to get rich on the taxpayer's dime. They have run out of our money and if permitted to do business as usual, will also run out of an already shrinking tax base.

Pat Haraburda & Michael Lodise

Philadelphia Tea Party Patriots Northwest

Jim Callos

Center City Tea Party Patriots

Edyie Rodenbaugh

Northeast Philadelphia Tea Party Patriots

Barbara Dahdah-Anderson

Southwest Philadelphia Tea Party Patriots

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Careful on Prop. 8, conservatives

It's a big story that federal Judge Walker has invalidated the California ban on same-sex marriages as unconstitutional.

But the real big story is that the conservative losers in this case, forever blabbing about states' rights, have started yelling that they're going to appeal Walker's decision to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. I'm not so sure that they want to go there.

The rhetorical question for today is if California's now-illegal Prop. 8 said rather that blacks or Hispanics or American Indians were not allowed to marry to protect the sanctity of marriage, would these conservative windbags still want to support it?

Conservatives want to appeal this all the way up to the Supreme Court, where they apparently believe that activist right-wing judges like Scalia, Roberts, Thomas and Alito are just champing at the bit to codify their bigotry. Never let it be said that the right has even an idea of what the intent of our Constitution's framers was all about.

Marc Golde, Merion Station

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Bad math on tax cuts

Letter-writer Randolph Husava is the latest person to throw out the garbage about the Bush tax cuts being a giveaway to the rich, and as an added bonus, Mr. Husava claims it was done on the backs of the middle class.

Those wealthy people who Mr. Husava and so many liberals like him despise but who provide jobs to a load of Americans paid more in taxes after the Bush tax cuts were enacted than they had before the tax cuts.

Conversely, the middle class, upon whose backs those tax cuts were supposedly put, paid less in taxes after the tax cuts were enacted then they did before them.

Tax cuts for the rich were paid for by the middle class? I would love to see how that's possible, considering that the bottom 50 percent of income earners paid about 5 percent of the taxes after the Bush tax cuts were enacted, while the top 10 percent pay nearly 70 percent.

Todd Cohen

Philadelphia