U.S. health crisis: Gun fever
Our country is having a health crisis. It’s called gun fever. The “doctors” of politics don’t seem to be able to recognize it, much less cure it.
The National Rifle Association has cultivated a climate of fear, an illness, which helped rashes of people purchase more guns, including semiautomatic assault-style weapons and large-capacity magazines, even flak vests, and devices like bumpstocks. Now they are circulating so that dangerous misfits can collect arsenals with which to kill as many people as possible.
What do we do now? It seems that shooting infants in Texas, and killing a class of first-graders in Connecticut, or shooting up a Republican baseball practice in Washington, D.C., did not get a response. What kind of people do nothing to remove these dangerous weapons from our society? This should end. But instead, the gun lobby smiles.
Suze Peace DeLand
Redirect the tourist-tax windfall
Using a contorted form of logic conflating Florida’s tourist development tax system with federal corporate income tax, Sunday letter-writer James Weatherspoon attempts to make the case that a GOP proposal to lower the corporate rate will not stimulate the economy. He fails to point out, though, that in most cases, no corporate income-tax revenue is generated on profits made by foreign corporate operations until those profits are repatriated to the United States.
A significantly lower statutory rate would induce a sea change of corporate behavior and provide a major incentive to bring those profits home and create a tax windfall for the country, along with fresh new capital, which would be deployed for new factories and jobs. When corporations and individuals have less of their income taken by taxes, they spend more and stimulate the economy.
As former Sentinel Managing Editor Jane Healy pointed out in her Central Florida 100 commentary, tourist-tax revenue has grown from $3 million a year to almost $20 million a month — hardly a stifling impact on tourism growth or business. New hotels continue to be built to satisfy an ever-increasing demand for rooms.
In other words, the tourist tax hasn’t negatively affected tourist spending behavior one bit. For more than 40 years, tourism has been the engine of growth in Central Florida, and it’s high time that we judiciously use some of that windfall of revenue to support local education, fire, police and infrastructure needs.
George W. Koehn Winter Park
Congresswoman’s ‘survey’ disappoints
Recently, I received an email from my congresswoman wanting to know what I thought about the current Republican House tax plan and asking if I would take a survey. Thinking that it was good that this representative wanted to know about my thoughts on the various revisions in the plan to our current tax laws, I opened the survey.
It wasn’t a survey at all. It was a political vote, since it asked only one question: “Do you support the tax plan? Yes or No.” It’s truly a shame that she didn’t take the time to summarize each of the changes to our current tax code, and ask for opinions on each one. This would have been a useful survey.
Our Congress is so polarized that legislators don’t see the forest, much less the individual trees. Is there any hope that they might try to work together for the benefit of the American people?
Roy Ray Winter Springs
