To the editor:
No, Nick, I will not get over it.
Bravo, Chuck Schott and Vicki Klein, for your votes! I shake my head to those who voted the other way.
I, as a taxpayer, will gladly surrender tax money to improve First Avenue without it being held hostage by the DOT.
First Avenue does not, I mean does not, need to be a three-lane street.
The stupidity of it from Willis to Pattee is dumb enough. Now let’s create even more confusion, congestion and hostility down the entire highway? And for what? So we don’t have to pay for improvements?
Another reason why we are laughed at, and don’t think we aren’t. We have great things going on in this town. This moronic idea is not one of them.
If our city people want to govern like it’s Des Moines, then please move to Des Moines!
Patrick J. Graney
Perry
What Pat Graney said? Good Lord. This is Perry, Iowa, not frickin’ LA. Ridic.
I can recall Highway 144 when it was a two-lane black-top going through Perry. In addition to that, Highway 141 went through the middle of town on Willis Avenue. No by-pass then. When driving south on First Street, when reaching the old Meadow Gold plant, you were very close to being in the country. Two lanes, east and west out of town. And guess what, Perry prospered and grew. Oh, I almost forgot. Throw in a great number of trains traveling through town crossing First Street day and night, sometimes blocking traffic for 20 minutes. Now that the bridge has been replaced over Frog creek to accommodate heavier traffic, the weight scale for trucks has been moved to West Willis Avenue in the proximity of the pork processing plant. Progress? Sometimes, change for the sake of change is not progress. I have neither a degree in engineering nor traffic management. I do, however, have common sense and tend not to be wasteful of taxpayer monies. No cost to the taxpayers of Perry, you say? Well, somebody is paying for it. You, with every gallon of gas you purchase and every time you put license plates on your car! There is no free lunch, folks.
There is no such thing as common sense. The term serves only to seek an emotional response when referring to someone as not having common sense. Common sense, if it really existed, would dictate the term has the same meaning for everyone, but it does not. It is an elastic term and can mean anything and everything to whoever uses it. It has no real meaning at all because it means anything you want it to. Your references to the old days is a common reactionary tactic used by those who resist change. It also seeks to appeal on an emotional level, not necessarily having anything to do or relating to present affairs. Bringing up taxation has little to do with the subject either and is just an emotional ploy as the others I’ve mentioned. Taxes? Benefitting and prospering from a system without paying one’s equitable share of taxes is theft. Taxation is a wonderful thing. Taxes well spent improves the quality of life for us all. Ironically, it is taxation that makes free enterprise, home ownership and acquisition of private property possible for the lower classes. The wealthy have those things regardless.
FOUR THINGS:
#1. There is such thing as common sense. Anyone with sound judgment or good sense or logic or a sense of practicality or wisdom or rationality knows this.
COMMON SENSE DEFINITION
NOUN
1. sound practical judgment that is independent of specialized knowledge, training, or the like; normal native intelligence.
Synonyms: ‘good sense’; ‘logic’; ‘practicality’; ‘wisdom’; ‘rationality’; ‘sound judgment’
This sounds like another in a long line of examples of so-called progressives trying to redefine words and phrases and/or pretend like a word or phrase can mean whatever anyone wants the word or phrase to mean in order to make their poor argument sound legitimate. This idea that words and phrases can mean whatever a person wants them to mean sounds a lot like my-truth-may-not-be-your-truth progressive babble that has become rampant over the past 30 years.
Sure, a person can use a word or phrase for the sole purpose of eliciting an emotional response, but that does not negate the fact that the word or phrase has one, specific, common meaning.
#2. “Taxation is a wonderful thing.” No. Taxation is not a wonderful thing. Taxation is a necessary part of life and should only be used by the will of the people as directed in the Constitution through constitutional means. Why? Because our country is a constitutional republic, not a democracy.
#3. “Taxes well spent improve the quality of life for us all.” Raise your hand if you actually believe that our federal taxes are well spent. . . . I’m not seeing any hands. Anyone who looks at our $21 trillion federal debt cannot with a straight face say that taxes are well spent. At the local and state level in Iowa, maybe. At the federal level? Absolutely not.
#4. “It is taxation that makes free enterprise, home ownership and acquisition of private property possible for the lower classes.” NO. It is free-market capitalism freed from an over-regulating, over-taxing federal government bureaucracy that entices capitalists and entrepreneurs to make more investments with their money, which allows more businesses to expand and new businesses to begin, which creates demand for more employees, which lowers the unemployment rate, which creates a smaller pool of employees to choose from, which creates an environment where businesses feel the need to offer higher wages to attract employees from the smaller pool or from other businesses, which makes it possible for people in the lower classes to make more money, which allows them to acquire private property and own a home and gain wealth.
All of this has the effect of creating record federal income tax revenue. [The federal government collected a record $1,415,150,000,000 in individual income taxes through the first ten months of fiscal 2018. ~CNSNews ~Aug. 2018] Guess when the previous record occurred? The first ten months of 2017. This is what conservatives want. This is what you have seen happen since November 2016. This is why the economy has taken off since November 2016.
However, when you have Democrats (and Republicans who claim to be conservative but act just like Democrats) continue to spend money that we do not have, you end up with an almost $700 billion deficit. [The federal government ran a $683,965,000,000 deficit in October through July of fiscal 2018 because while collecting its $2,766,071,000,000 in total taxes, it spent $3,450,035,000,000. ~CNSNews ~Aug. 2018]
Want to keep the economy humming? Elect more conservatives.
Please let me add that I am neither a philosopher nor a psychologist. The latter, however, number in the hundreds of thousands. And, incidentally, if laid out head to toe, those aforementioned individuals would easily stretch from Chicago to Denver. And the world would be better off if they were left there undisturbed.