Letter to the editor: Voice of America not best use of taxpayer money

Tribune-Review | Monday, April 14, 2025 7:00 a.m.

Can you hear me now or is anyone really listening? The writer of the letter “We have silenced ourselves” (April 11, TribLive) grieves the purge of Voice of America from the U.S. taxpayers’ checkbook.

I guess baseball, hot dogs with Coke and Chevrolets will make the huddled masses see the light to want to remake themselves in the image of the USA. Except the advertisement comes with a cost — $267 million annually.

I get it, freedom of expression and worship are wonderful things, but when most of the world does not know when or where the next meal is coming from, a radio (if one can be had) extolling the virtues of the land of the free to listen to a broadcast punishable by death by the reigning regime isn’t very practical. So, what’s your point?

In Vietnam, this same experiment cost the USA 58,000 lives and $1 trillion in blood and treasure. In Iraq, it cost 4,500 American deaths, over 200,000 Iraqi deaths and $757 billion mortgaged by “We the People” at the Bank of the People’s Republic of China.

Yet the last I heard 50-plus years on, the people in those countries still don’t celebrate the Fourth of July.

David A. Scandrol

Lower Burrell