Letters

Time magazine reported recently that the estimated tax gap — the amount of money the IRS fails to collect due to misfiling or tax cheaters — is an estimated $600 billion.

Cadillac and Lincoln, America’s top luxury automobiles for the past one hundred years, are failing because many of their vehicles are being imported, mostly from Mexico.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) is blaming the Obama White House for the Boston Marathon bombings.

I am amazed at the incompetence of Republicans in Washington when it comes to explaining the simplest issues

Uncertainty around U.S. military base closures has caught some attention (“Obama campaigned against military base closures now in his budget,” April 10), but uncertainty about the ongoing U.S. war in Afghanistan has gone largely unnoticed. In fact, there is so much uncertainty around President Obama’s plan to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan that the government can’t even properly budget for it — unlike the base closures, which did have a budget request.

A recent proposal from Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) to restrict the use of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits solely to healthy foods does not address the deeper problem of food insecurity.

According to Americans for the Arts, the nonprofit arts industry generates $29.6 billion in federal, state and local tax revenues annually

From Lauren Caplan, attorney and Georgetown Law fellow

If we allow our “national conversation” on gun regulation to end without Congress even voting on a ban on high-capacity magazines, we should all be ashamed. It would mean that, once again, we have allowed this debate to be distorted by the idea that the Second Amendment provides a right more absolute than almost every other right protected by the Constitution. The entire U.S. regulatory system is based on the careful balancing of individual rights against considerations of public safety and health. Why should the discussion about gun regulation be any different? Why have we allowed the discussion to be different?

As North Korea threatens nuclear attack (“North Korea threatens US with ‘preemptive’ nuclear attack,” March 7), Congress is inexplicably focused on military cuts that would hurt our veterans and leave U.S. cities dangerously exposed.

According to James Pavle, director of the treatment Advocacy Center in Arlington, Va., there were 3,000 severely mentally ill patients’ to every hospital bed in 2005. People with paranoid schizophrenia or bipolar illness desperately need long-term hospital care, but for many, it is just not available. Are some of these patients part of the rash of violence plaguing the country today?