Over the weekend, the Las Vegas Sun published a letter to the editor from a Henderson resident in response to Attorney General Aaron Ford’s most recent op-ed in the same paper. She highlighted Ford’s personal story “about what’s possible when the government sees people not as numbers, but as neighbors … when the government says: You matter.” Ford wrote about his personal experience growing up struggling to make ends meet, how Nevada’s economy is struggling under Joe Lombardo, Donald Trump’s cuts to Medicaid and SNAP to pay for tax cuts for billionaires, and his vision to move Nevada forward.

Read Attorney General Ford’s op-ed below:

Las Vegas Sun: Aaron Ford: Our economy is suffering; it’s time to move Nevada forward

Aaron Ford

Key points from AG Ford’s Op-Ed:

• I know what it means to struggle.
  
  

• I grew up in a working-class family. My dad stocked produce at Safeway, and my mom worked odd jobs to keep us going. One of my earliest memories is of my brother and I having to eat stale candy bars for dinner — candy that my dad found next to the dumpster behind his job.
  
  

• When I became a dad during college — and then a single dad — Medicaid helped me and my son see a doctor. Food stamps helped keep us fed. Education gave me hope. And because I never gave up, I earned five degrees, became a public school math teacher, served as majority leader of the Nevada state Senate, and today, I’m honored to serve as your attorney general.
  
  

• That’s not just my story. That’s a story about what’s possible when the government sees people not as numbers, but as neighbors. That’s what happens when the government says: You matter.
  
  

• Too many Nevadans are still pushing that rock uphill — working hard, playing by the rules, and still falling behind. Prices are up, paychecks aren’t stretching far enough and it feels like the deck is stacked against us, because it is.
  
  

• That’s why it’s so personal for me to see President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress pass a tax bill that will cut Medicaid for more than 100,000 Nevadans and slash SNAP benefits for the more than half a million Nevadans who depend on it — all to pay for the largest permanent tax cuts for billionaires in history. The bill will slash food assistance while food insecurity is rising in Nevada — and I know what it’s like to not know where your next meal is coming from. It will gut health care, even as Nevada has seen the biggest increase in prescription drug prices of any state over the past three decades. It’ll cause our state to lose clean energy jobs and energy costs to rise. And it’ll increase the national deficit by $3 trillion.
  
  

• All of this, and Gov. Joe Lombardo said we should be “excited” about this betrayal of a bill. That’s not leadership; that’s letting us down.

###