Letter: Holiday snobbery

Op-ed columns are obviously opinion, but when you copy right out of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” isn’t that plagiarism? I don’t know why your columnist feels that the holiday season, usually a time for goodwill and giving, is a time to give the working people of Aspen a “beat-ing” (“Examining Aspen, anger and envy,” Commentary, Glenwood Springs Post Independent, Dec. 18).

I did not realize until now that the maids, nurses, firemen, police, bus drivers, maintenance workers, tradespeople and restaurant staff (the list goes on) come to work each day to “take” from the wealthy.

Actually, recent financial revelations from many who study our economic system find that the wealth redistribution from about 1970 has been all upward. The adjusted median wage is worth less now than then. The minimum wage has not been raised in years and is now worth less than when it was last set. There will be no cost-of-living increase for Social Security recipients (of their own money). Taxes on the highest earners are far less now than under President Eisenhower (90 percent then). The tax code should be renamed “American loopholes.”

The American “middle class” has shrunk relative to the top and bottom. Middle-age, middle-class “white guys” are taking themselves out at a rate never seen before — drugs, booze and bullets. College students graduate with record debt and can’t find jobs that can pay off the loans.

There is “taking” going on, all right, from the bottom up. Happy holidays!

Patrick Hunter

Carbondale