A Letter to Congressman Chip Cravaack, Subject: Disability, Wasteful Spending and Entitlements

06. September 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Dear Congressman Cravaack,

I’m a constituent in your district, and I recently stumbled upon your financial disclosure forms for the year of 2011.

I was perplexed by what I found. In 2011, you received $92,273 in union disability payments. As I understand it, you have sleep apnea. It’s a serious illness, and it’s certainly worthy of disability payments. I’m sorry you have it.

That’s not why I’m writing. Rather, I’m writing because I noticed that in the same year that you received disability payments from your union, you also received the standard salary that members of Congress receive—$174,000. (Unless you opted out, you also received that salary this year.) Furthermore, as the “assets and earned income” section of the financial disclosure forms make clear, you also have quite a few other assets. You have a couple houses, a cabin, not to mention bank accounts and other funds worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. (The checklist of that page looked a bit like a tic-tac-toe game gone wild.)

Truth be told, it seems disingenuous for you to claim disability at all. You’re working a full-time job (and have a great deal of other assets), and as a Congressman you’ve made it clear how much you dislike unnecessary, wasteful spending.

But you’re taking part in exactly such wasteful spending yourself; the only difference is that we’re talking about a private disability trust. Nonetheless, the principles are the same—other disabled Delta workers no doubt need that money far more than you do. After all, not everyone at Delta earned a pilot’s salary, can hold down a good-paying full-time job, or has your net worth.

So in the end, you’re taking a handout—and one that you don’t even need. For someone who argues that “Congress must learn to do what families in Minnesota do every day, live within our means” that’s quite a strange example for you to set.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Take care,
Brett Ortler

 

 

 

For once, I’m going to be serious

29. December 2010 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , , , ,

Dear Everyone,

For once, I’m going to be serious. This is a brief note to all the folks that have been kind enough to follow my series of zany letters to President Obama.

First of all, thank you. The social networking site Gather got me started on this (rather strange) project, and it’s turned into something I never expected. I wrote my first letter on a whim, after I saw a photo of President Obama in a Chicago White Sox hat. As I’m an inveterate Minnesota Twins fan, I naturally reacted with shock, so I wrote him an open letter and encouraged him to change his ways. (After all, this was the middle of the financial crisis, and that whole debate was framed as “Wall Street vs. Main Street.” Given that the Twins played in a stadium that bears some resemblance to the Michelin Man, it seemed quite clear that the Twins were more “Main Street.”)

As I’d just heard about Gather, I decided to post the letter. The next morning,  I couldn’t believe the response I received. Minnesota Public Radio was kind enough to post a link to their letter on their blog, and far more people were interested in reading the article than I expected.

So I wrote another, and another. Naturally, I sent the letters to the White House, receiving no response. (The guy has been a bit busy, so I understand.)

Well, it’s more than a year later, and I’ve written 66 letters so far. Along the way, I’ve been lucky enough to be featured on Minnesota Public Radio’s show “In the Loop” and I’ve received all sorts of wonderful notes from readers.

So I figured it was time to send along a proper thank you. It means a great deal to me to have my (rather dorky) words read and appreciated (or even despised).

I’m also writing with some good news. The first collection of my rather zany letters are now available on the Nook and the on the Kindle as electronic books. They’re pretty cheap ($2.99), and it’s rather exciting to be able to get them out to a wider audience.

So thank you again for that, and for everything.

Take care,

Brett