Taxes Are Bad, Damn It!
Tom Danehy wonders just who it is that the Tea Baggers want to take back our country from (Oct. 14). Well, perhaps it is from all of the liberal politicians whose cure for every ill is a tax increase. After all, the Tea in Tea Party stands for Taxed Enough Already. And just what business is it of the federal government to decide who should make what, anyway? That idea seems to be more appropriate to the old USSR than the Land of the Free.
President Obama’s desire to raise taxes on a family making $250,000 is likely to have unintended results, for that is what most people running small businesses make. Raising their taxes will mean fewer jobs, unless you honestly believe small-business owners will snatch the food from their families’ mouths.
The liberal Democrats seem to have forgotten the lesson they learned back in the ‘80s when they tried heavily taxing the sale of boats and small aircraft. This had to be repealed when it drove sales offshore and nearly destroyed the boat-building and small-aircraft industries.
Charles W. Walker
Legalize Pot, and Tax Another Vice!
I’m writing about Robert Sharpe’s thoughtful letter, “Decriminalizing Marijuana Would Lead to Many Good Things” (Mailbag, Oct. 14).
It’s high time to fully legalize pot. Only fully legal products of any kind can be regulated, taxed and controlled by any government agency. Speaking of taxing pot, it seems to me that non-marijuana users would be in favor of taxing pot. Around these parts, taxing someone else’s vice is very popular.
Kirk Muse
Card-Check Elections Would Lessen Worker Intimidation
You were right to refrain from taking a position on Proposition 113 since you did not understand all of its implications (“The 2010 Tucson Weekly Endorsements,” Oct. 7), but voters ought to reject this measure on Nov. 2.
More than 50 percent of American workers say they would like to belong to a union, but only 12.5 percent are unionized—down from 35 percent in the mid-1950s. Many of those workers were organized through the card-check system, which operated between 1935 and 1945, the heyday of labor-organizing in this country.
Proposition 113 is intended to make it impossible for people to form a union without a certification election. But certification elections often fail, because employers intimidate workers. Half of them hint that they will close if workers vote “yes.” Some 23,000 people per year are fired or disciplined for union activities.
Laura Tabili
Grijalva = Fighter for Green Jobs
Thank you, Tucson Weekly, for your continued coverage of the 2010 election. It is interesting that Ruth McClung did not want to debate Congressman Raúl Grijalva (“Why McClung Backed Out of Debate,” The Range, Oct. 15). Could it be that she has no concrete solutions to our economic crisis other than privatizing Social Security? Instead of moving ahead toward green industries, which will create more jobs and help us to compete with other nations, she is following those policies which created the situation we are facing right now.
Grijalva is advocating a new green energy policy which will bring jobs and wealth to Arizona and the nation. He has consistently voted to protect our wildlife and conserve the beautiful natural environment that all Arizonans are proud of. He is the candidate we need to represent us.
Carol Masuda
Grijalva = The Second Coming, Basically
Congressman Raúl Grijalva has tirelessly fought for all the people he represents. He has, for his entire career, put the electorate first, whether in education, conservation, social security, health-insurance coverage or green-job development. He has never pretended to be someone he’s not. A native Arizonan, he is a man who always has our best interests in mind and in his vote. He has represented Southern Arizona’s interests in the legacy of Morris “Mo” Udall and Raul Castro, consistently making me proud to tell friends in other parts of the state and the country that Grijalva represents me.
Financed by outside interests, we cannot trust Ruth McClung’s intentions. She has never represented a constituency nor demonstrated a commitment to public service. She will continue to demonstrate loyalty only to those big businesses that financed her campaign.
In response to an AzCentral.com question on congressional ethics, McClung suggests, “We don’t need bills that are thousands of pages long and are impossible to read and understand.” I prefer a representative whose reading comprehension abilities include understanding legislation.
If a bachelor’s degree in physics makes you a physicist, or a rocket scientist, as she prefers to call herself, then I guess a bachelor’s degree in physiology makes you a doctor. I don’t want her operating on me. Ruth McClung genuflects to corporate greed, denies climate change and exaggerates her very limited credentials.
I am voting for Raúl Grijalva.
Melanie Emerson
Correction
”Razing Arizona” (Oct. 21) misstated some potential cutbacks of health-insurance coverage for Arizonans below the poverty line. Unless they agree to use more general-fund dollars for the program, state lawmakers may roll back eligibility for AHCCCS coverage to 50 percent of the federal poverty line for families with children, not 33 percent, as the story stated.
This article appears in Oct 28 – Nov 3, 2010.
Charles W. Walker,
I wouldn’t presume to attempt to change your mind but, for the record, I want people to know that you haven’t even the smallest clue what you are talking about.
The original tea party protest was organized to fight against a tax cut put in place by the king of England to favor a special interest group, the wealthy stockholders of the East India Company. This tax cut gave this monopoly an unfair competative advantage over the small business traders in the colonies. Sound familiar? Let me say it once again, AGAINST A TAX CUT. God I hate people who resort to capitalization rather than utilizing reason.
You seem to think that none of us remember what we read about the last time that the republicans cut taxes below a marginal rate of 50% for the wealthiest during the 1920’s.
Just as in this past decade, our financial sector was turned into a casino, creating a huge bubble, destroying our economy for a decade.
Apparently accumulating wealth enhances greed exponentially, and has the inverse effect on intelligence.
Robert Alexander Dumas
Inverse as opposed to convex? I will hear about the jazzy 20’s from you. Sorry, but, This is an assault on intelligence, education and just plain common sense.
Your lies about the 50% are outrageous. Where’s the proof. Except that people where jumping out of buildings because they were the greed factor that bought the market down.
Who do the Tea Baggers want to get their back from? Easy. From the black man sitting in the White House. There really is nothing complicated about this election season (or any other for that matter):
1. Republicans (and Tea Baggers) don’t like having an African-American president.
2. They don’t like having a woman as Speaker of the House.
3. Republicans are for corporations, not people.
4. Republicans don’t worship a god as much as they worship money and power. They lust after both equally. They have the money, but without the power, the money is just piss running down their legs.
Where were all the tea baggers when Bush was running up bills on wars we could neither justify nor afford? How are Afghanistan and Iraq suddenly the current administration’s fault? And where were the baggers when Bush handed out the first gigantic relief package to banks? Did only the second poorly-planned expenditure count as “bad”? Obama and the democrats have been mealy-mouthed and indecisive about nearly everything, but they didn’t dig the hole…they might be able to start to get us out if given enough time- it sure took a while to come to this.
But who are we kidding? The tea bag people don’t want their country ‘back’ from anything even remotely like taxes. They live no worse now than they did 4 years ago unless they lost their job…not Obama’s fault. They’ve been stamping their little feet, clenching their little fists and gritting their little teeth since losing congress in ’06. Old farts in Wisconsin foaming at the mouth about the “illegals?” Please. They KNOW that they’re powerless in the face of steamroller commercial interests much more powerful than they are, and yet they still want to vote for people who will screw them every time out. Want “free markets?” Cool- your congressman will happily vote to allow your bank to add even MORE fees. Smarten up: The GOP’s free market doesn’t apply to you!!! You’re too small for them, but they need you to consistently support them to the detriment of your own best interests! Ingenious how they do that, isn’t it? “Free country”? Awesome- show me your papers please. Yes, you too, whitey. Having to answer any cop’s questions, any time, for any amount of time, for the most trivial of reasons is a small price to pay for “freedom”, isn’t it? The tea baggers have allowed their attention to be diverted from just how badly they’re getting screwed, and are finding scapegoats right and left.
The comon belief that tax rates have something to do with jobs is a fallacy. Employees are a tax deductible expense, and employees add value, they create additional profits. Taxes take back a small portion of those profits, the business owner keeps most of it. Thinking that a business wouldn’t hire an employee because they would only get to keep 80% instead of 90% of every extra dollar that the employee earns is naive.
Charles: Your boat tax comment is well timed, although actually unrelated to the “taxes” that you rail about. Those boat and luxury taxes were SALES taxes, not income taxes, and they work differently. Apparently it’s Republicans and Tea Partiers who forget how people actually respond to taxes. High sales taxes killed the boat business, because that’s what happens when you penalize consumption, yet a congressional candidate in CD-8 is for tripling the sales tax.
Hey, dinah, the proof is easy to find on the net. Marginal tax rates went below 30% twice in the last century, once in 1925, just before the Depression, and in the late 80’s, which led to the current mess. America’s strongest economic performance was in the 50’s and 60’s, when the marginal rate was 90%.