To the Editor:
Last week we unpacked a box from the attic. Wrapped around a jar inside was a 2013 page of the Daily Journal. I was reading the headlines when it occurred to me how many of the problems in our state and nation that it highlighted were still problems.
Page 2 begins with an article on the federal budget. The article outlines that the Republicans in Congress were against the Democrats’ proposals. Republicans list all the bad things that will happen if the government shuts down but, they refuse the Democrats’ proposal for a minimum tax on the wealthy, cuts in farm subsidies and a gradual reduction in Pentagon spending.
We are still faced with the same problems because elected politicians are more interested in legislating how citizens should be making personal decisions than applying their religious ethics to the wealthy who could be sharing their wealth by making life better for all. For example, reducing the national debt by paying a higher percentage of taxes.
Next, on page 2, is an article about adding policemen to schools for protection. The time is just after the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting.
The article outlines the spending of $10 million to fund 200 grants to schools to make threat assessments and prepare preparedness plans. It would not fund the ongoing cost of providing police in the schools or pay for extra training for the officers. That would fall to the school corporations and the individual officers.
Has this made a difference? Has gun legislation by the legislators been a part of these of these plans? How many school shootings have happened since Sandy Hook?
Besides briefs on a mass transit plan that hasn’t materialized and a plan to gasify coal to sell to consumers for 30 years, page 2, also, has an article on President Obama’s proposal that preschool be funded by the federal government. Republicans were wary of the high costs.
How typical. They are for the high cost of exempting businesses from paying taxes instead of using those taxes to improve the ability to provide high-quality workers for those businesses. High-quality workers take years to develop — from childhood to adulthood. It’s called education.
The big argument in the present state news is that too many children are not learning to read by third grade. The only answer that politicians can come up with is to retain a child in the third grade.
Perhaps if they funded more preschool; perhaps if they paid teachers higher wages so they could attract higher quality students to the profession; perhaps if they funded all school students in the state with equal dollars; perhaps if they did not use tax dollars for vouchers to buy private education for families, fewer children would lack the opportunity to learn to read.
If Hoosiers want to improve their lives, they need to study carefully what their elected politicians are really legislating. After 10 years, politicians in this state have not been concerned with spending tax dollars to improve citizens’s lives. Citizens need to consider changing the people they vote for, the issues politicians are targeting, and why the tax money is not being spent on the issues citizens care about.
Karen Vaughn
Franklin
