Readers Write (Oct. 28): Processed meats, student loans, parking meters, Benghazi, squirrels

Ahhh, shades of the Great Cranberry Scare of 1959 ("WHO study says bacon, sausage can cause cancer," Oct. 27). Whenever any report about health (or just about anything else, for that matter) comes out, all of our media outlets seem to cherry-pick from the report and sensationalize it. Give us a break. Please give us realistic coverage, not a scary-as-Halloween-ghouls overreaction.

I was in high school in 1959 when the Great Cranberry Scare descended upon us like the hoped-for Great Pumpkin in the Peanuts comic strip.

"Cranberry Pesticide Carcinogenic" blared the headlines. "Don't eat it!" warned the secretary of health in Washington. Tests of lab mice showed an increase in cancer rates.

And, by the way, at the dosage of pesticide in the tests, you could be at risk IF you ate many TONS of such sprayed cranberries a year.

I learned a valuable lesson then about the media's power to scare the bejeebers out of us with selective reporting and scary headlines. Be sure to sprinkle a large dose of salt on such "news." Oops, can't say that, as there IS empirical evidence that too much salt is not good for us.

Anyway, the hyperbolization of stories by the media reminds me of the adage in drag racing about engine power: "If some is good, then more is better, and too much is just right."

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To Bill Boegeman ("Interest rates keep borrowers in the hole," Oct. 26): As undergraduate students who are learning about loans, loan payments, etc., we decided to take a look at your student loan situation. Using the information you provided in your article, we calculated a cumulative effective annual interest rate of 6.42 percent (among all three banks). The current interest rates for unsubsidized federal undergraduate and graduate loans are 4.29 percent and 5.84 percent, respectively. While the amount of interest accruing on your loan may seem unfair, that is part of the cost of higher education. It is important to view an undergraduate and/or graduate degree as an investment. If you continue to make payments of $500 a month, it should take you approximately 35 years to fully pay off your loans. If you were to increase your monthly payments by $84 to a total of $584, you could fully pay off your loans in 23 years (which is 12 years sooner than your current plan). Since interest accrues on the loan balance, it makes sense to pay off your loans sooner, rather than later, because less interest will be able to accrue on your loan balance. It pays off to make small sacrifices now in order to live without the weight of student loan debts in the future.

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Boegeman, faced with high-interest payments, puts the blame on financial institutions. That's like blaming the lender because you borrowed $10 to buy a cup of coffee that you could have purchased for $1.09.

Loan forgiveness doesn't work. Colleges will keep raising tuition because their customers are using free money. Student/parent college loans are staggering. In fact, such debt exceeds credit card debt.

So what is the remedy? There is no silver bullet, but here are beginning steps:

Second, offer tuition-free education at Minnesota's excellent two-year institutions. This will reduce demand on the high-tuition colleges.

For those of us who took Econ 101 at the University of Minnesota, we found that when the price of a pound of beef goes to $20 a pound (Carleton and St. Thomas), chicken sellers (U of M) can raise prices to $10 a pound. (See: $160 million athletic building.)

College debt loads have far-reaching consequences, including delayed family formation and home purchases and endangered retirement incomes of loving and gullible parents.

I, too, became a social-studies teacher with a four-year tuition cost of $942 in 1962. My starting salary was 500 percent of my total tuition bill. Boegerman's is 40 percent.

Something bad has happened!

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My favorite thing about the new Minneapolis parking app ("Pay-by-phone parking goes live in Mpls.," Oct. 27) is that now I get to pay to pay! If I use the app, my average street parking cost will increase by 25 percent or more. Thank you!

I've not been terribly impressed with Hillary Clinton's handling of either the Benghazi aftermath or her e-mail fiasco, but to depict her cheerfully dancing on the graves of those who died in Benghazi, as did the Oct. 27 editorial cartoon by Dana Summers of Tribune Content Agency, seems an extraordinary stretch. I believe it is Clinton's opposition that has been using these deaths for political purposes and not her. The fact that she was able to thwart their purposes should not be a reason to shift this blame.

Squirrels eating fall pumpkins or Halloween jack-o'-lanterns (Variety, Oct. 27)? Don't fight it; enjoy it. Go to the local farmers market, stock up on pumpkins, put them out for the squirrels, then sit back and enjoy the show. A win all around. Farmers make some money, squirrels gain much-needed nourishment for winter months and you are not only paying it forward, but you have the privilege of watching our wild, furry friends in action.