To the Editor:

I woke up the other morning with a stabbing pain in my back. I looked in the mirror and saw what appeared to be a knife between my shoulder blades.

I didn’t know what to make of it until I looked at the paper and read the story about how the supervisors weren’t going to raise taxes, but instead wanted to charge each household a $200 fee for trash disposal (“Budget draft: No tax hike,” April 27).

I looked in the dictionary, and there is a slight difference in the description of fees and taxes, but I guarantee you that my checkbook can’t tell the difference.

I retired two years ago for health reasons, and my only income is Social Security. My wife is still working part time, but desperately needs to retire also for her health.

This would put us both at the mercy of Social Security for our livelihood.

We need to keep our expenses as low as possible just to survive, and just as everyone else is, we are dealing with constantly increasing cost of gas, medical necessities and just about everything else we need just to survive.

Unlike the government, which can demand more from its citizens to meet its spending, we can’t demand that Social Security send us more money each month because we find it impossible to exist on what we receive.

Times are tight, and the supervisors need to keep trying to find ways to balance the budget without bleeding the citizens dry. Nobody said it would be easy, but they wanted the job, now let’s see them deal with it.

Jerry Nahrebecki
Newsoms