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Letter: Stewart owes his career and paycheck to socialism

(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Rep. Chris Stewart says a few words during the annual Security Summit at the Joseph Smith Memorial Building, Friday, Aug. 2, 2019.

Rep. Chris Stewart was educated at a publicly funded college (socialism). He didn’t go $80,000 in debt learning to be a pilot. The Air Force trained him, fed and housed him, provided no-cost health care to him and his family. He still collects a taxpayer-funded paycheck as a member of congress. The work skills and education he garnered came from socialist, government-funded programs.

What Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren want is a fairer capitalist system where money flows more evenly. Currently, the corporate elite control the levers of our economy and control the lawmakers who write the laws. Our current system is rigged against working families and most of the wealth we create flows to the top. That needs to change.

The zombie Stewart describes in his uninformed commentary piece is not socialism; it’s the resurgence of laissez-faire (pirate) capitalism. We thought that zombie died during the Great Depression when we reformed that failed system. It has slithered back steadily over the last 40 years and once again, we see the middle class disappearing. For the first time since the Great Depression, our kids won’t have the economic opportunity to do better than we did. Out-of-control corporate capitalism is the zombie that must be laid to rest.

John Nelson, Wellsville

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