On page A2 of your Oct. 26 edition from a New York Times/CBS poll, you feature a story, "Americans deeply skeptical about budget, poll indicates." In that piece, you give legitimacy to one of many loony polls that combine has conducted. What you should have done is also publish a sample of the questions asked in that poll, such as, "Would you rather balance the budget or take big cuts in Medicare?" Those are not two mutually exclusive propositions.
The plan to balance the budget by 2002 also increases the funding for each Medicare recipient by about $1,900 over the same period of time. But, the way the question was asked in the poll, it was made to be an "either/or" proposition. All the budget does is reduce the rate of growth. Medicare will continue to increase each year in its cost per recipient. (And, I might add, AARP propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding, each recipient will receive more benefits, but they won't cost as much as the tax-and-spend Democrats and their Washington, D.C.-based AARP lapdogs would like.)Some of us are old enough to remember that the New York Times also had a poll on the presidential race between Dewey and Harry Truman and that its early morning edition ready for the streets the morning after the election had a front-page banner headline, "DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN," which they had to eat because, as usual, their poll was wrong.
Often on your editorial pages you run a New York Times piece that is about as accurate as those I have cited. For balance, why doesn't the Deseret News editorial staff run an editorial from time to time taken from The Washington (D.C.) Times? Or do you only subscribe to the Washington Post and the New York Times - both bastions of political correctness and liberal bias?
Howard A. Matthews
Bountiful