I find it very interesting that the Portland School Department insisted that we taxpayers shell out millions for the new Ocean Avenue School because Nathan Clifford, due to the department’s neglect, was in such disrepair.

Now it’s supposed to be a center for teacher education. Nathan Clifford should be put back on the tax rolls so that we taxpayers can recoup some of the money we had to shell out!

With all the schools scattered around the city, I’m sure the School Department can put in a little effort and find places to hold meetings and classes for its staff.

Patricia Bernard

Portland

Politicians play games while citizens just suffer

As Congress continues to ignore the issue, the rest of the country watches gas and oil prices increase and share concerns about how we will survive if the government closes.

Instead of working together for their constituents, they continue to play politics. I don’t care if they are Republicans, Democrats or independents. When are they going to remember why they were elected?

While they fight each other, we wonder how we will survive the many cuts that Republicans feel will “balance the budget.”

Cutting programs like welfare, pensions, health insurance, heating assistance, Planned Parenthood, collective bargaining, unions and help for children or the elderly may balance the budget, but subsidizing oil companies that don’t need help, giving foreign aid to countries that don’t like us, and continuing to enjoy the benefits of office with bloated salaries and benefits certainly make the rest of us less willing to make any further sacrifices.

What have we done? Where are we going? Can we get there without a conscience?

Glenis Elliott

West Bath

For many years now we have seen the American way of life, as us older citizens knew it, change to the whims of minorities and illegal immigrants, and we have stood by and let our elected government officials tear the United States apart to suit their own needs and pocketbooks.

Must we have an uprising like the one in Egypt to take our country back and get rid of our dictators? Surely it is something to think about.

Let’s go back to living under the original Constitution and the original American way of life.

Lindley Deering

Raymond

Taxes too high, professor, and gax taxes are included

Well, what a surprise. Someone else from the big-brain crowd has an issue with Gov. LePage’s proposals.

This time it’s Orlando Delogu, University of Maine emeritus professor of law.

It’s the professor’s position that Maine’s gas tax, one of the highest in the nation already, is too low.

If you buy 10 gallons of gas, Maine gets $2.95, the feds get $1.85, you get 10 gallons and the state and feds split almost five bucks. Sound low? Try my numbers on for size.

I own a gas station and if I sell 10,000 gallons of gas a week, the state gets $2,950, the feds get $1,840; that’s $4,790 a week.

For the simple folks, $249,000 a year in tax, one gas station, one small town. Still sound low?

Maybe, if you earn a professor’s salary. Perhaps we have finally discovered why the feds don’t include food or fuel while calculating inflation — folks like the good professor are doing the math.

He adds that Reagan’s tax cuts didn’t stimulate the economy, nor did Bush’s, and ties it all together with a whopper, saying states with lower taxes aren’t doing any better!

The professor is hoping the simple folks won’t remember the global recession, or Maine’s abysmal business rating, or staggering welfare commitments or environmental policies more restrictive than the federal standards — the list goes on.

What the professor doesn’t know is that We the Simple People do have some expertise. We have learned after long, painful years how to stretch a dollar.

Year after year, we have been regulated, taxed and inflated out of our earnings, so as a result we know how to manage tough times.

We know you can’t spend your way out of debt. We know you can’t constantly expect more out of diminishing reserves. We know things cannot continue like they have.

Mark Ferguson

Poland Spring

Columnist hits the mark: Keep Maine’s bottle bill

I read with great interest Greg Kesich’s discussion of how Maine’s bottle bill may fare in an anti-environment LePage administration (Feb. 16).

I must declare my interest at the outset. I was one of the many citizens in the 1970s who fought for the bottle bill, both as a member of the Keep Maine Scenic Committee and as a law student who wrote his senior thesis on the economic impacts of the legislation.

Kesich hits all the right points, so I won’t repeat them. While there may be aspects of the bottle bill that merit study (e.g., who should share in the unclaimed deposits; what to do about the Kramer-Newman fraud problem, assuming it is a real problem), the most-needed reform would be increasing the deposit from 5 cents to 10 cents (or 15) to account for the inflation of the past 30-plus years.

The bottle bill is one of the crown jewels of Maine environmental policy. It has succeeded enormously in reducing litter and in encouraging recycling. The bottlers were against the bill in the ’70s and indeed tried to repeal it by referendum in 1979 (the vote supporting the bill was 227,000 to 41,000). It would appear the bottlers think the current time is ripe for trying again.

Let’s make sure that they fail again.

Murrough H. O’Brien

Portland

Suspending Constitution only takes citing ‘terrorism’

I don’t know why the Egyptian military suspending their country’s constitution is so surprising. George W. Bush did it with ours.

And today, U.S. government officials need only say the magic word “terrorism” and they can do it whenever they like.

The American people don’t take to the streets. They just mutter “Well, if it keeps us just a little bit safer. …”

Edmund R. Peay

Brunswick

 

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