Letter To The Editor: Let’s Save Up For New Stuff

By DAVID F. JONES
Los Alamos

Is this the example we want to set for our children?

Would we guide our children to save up enough money to purchase a bike and the necessary safety equipment and then tack on a skateboard with borrowed money instead of saving up for the board? Even better, by making the bike and skateboard available to other kids, applying democracy, and adding a few more sops to gain the support of the majority of the school body, you can force your fellow students to pay for the loan. Wow, what a deal – right? What kid wouldn’t go for it? Who cares about the kids that already have a bike or don’t want one? As long as you can coax a majority of the other kids to pay, the rest can be forced to go into debt for you.

Kid talk from back in my day was “everyone else has one” and maybe today it’s evolved into “I want one”.

I doubt that many of us would choose to present this as a good direction for our children. Why then is it okay for us to take the same path? We apparently have $13.4 million burning a hole in our community pocket but that’s not enough. We are told that we need all of these recreational amenities and saving for them is too old school, so we need to burden ourselves, based on a majority vote, with an additional $20 million debt.

I know the arguments about how we really need these amenities now and many other communities either have them or are willing to go into debt for them. In my opinion, that’s not good enough. We spend lots of money for stuff in this county. We’re not talking about water treatment or roads here. These amenities are not necessities. Going into debt for them, even if we or other communities have set the precedent, is not the right approach. If we want them bad enough, we need to stop spending money on other niceties and save up so we can afford the new stuff.

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