Lodi doesn’t need parking meters

Editor: Lodi is a unique, well kept, well policed town that many of its residents are proud to be a part of.

The diversified combination of old and new bring to its residents the convenience of the new with the memories and pleasures of the past. Our downtown is one of its special places. A place we all can enjoy visiting, shopping, dining, relaxing and being proud of for ourselves and visitors to our area.

We have such an exceptionally good thing in our downtown. Why would we want to spoil it by installing parking meters? That would be such an insult to our prized downtown area, and to the local people who enjoy it.

As for myself, if they install parking meters I will avoid the area unless it is very necessary to go there. I hope everyone will support the “No Parking Meters Downtown” idea.

PHIL HAMILTON Lodi

Protect our national parks

Editor: In the 1800s, American author Henry David Thoreau wrote of the delights of solitude surrounded by natural beauty in his superb book, “Walden.” His writing preceded by many decades the U.S. environmental movement launched when Rachel Carson penned “Silent Spring.”

Not quite a century after Thoreau’s work raised the country’s awareness of its natural patrimony, President Theodore Roosevelt led a campaign to establish national parks. An avid outdoorsman and hunter, Roosevelt believed that some of the continent’s splendid wilderness areas should remain open, and the wildlife unique to this portion of the planet protected for all time.

Now that winter is closing many federal park sites, public attention is focused on more mundane aspects of daily life — work, family, sports, and school. Maybe that’s why President Donald Trump thinks he can get away with diminishing public parklands so his buddies in business can profit. He’ll swing the woodsman’s ax and cut down reserved lands in an announcement made near one of the parks, according to a Dec. 4 report by Reuters writer Valerie Volcovici:

“U.S. President Donald Trump will visit Utah ... to announce big cuts to the state’s sprawling wilderness national monuments, a move that is likely to trigger legal challenges from tribes and environmental groups ....

“Trump has said former presidents abused the act by putting unnecessarily big chunks of territory off limits to drilling, mining, grazing, road traffic and other activities — a headwind to his plan to ramp up U.S. energy output.

“Trump ... will call for an 85 percent cut to Utah’s 1.3 million-acre Bears Ears National Monument created in 2016 by then-President Barack Obama, and a 50 percent cut to the state’s 1.9 million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument created by Bill Clinton in 1996, according to documents published last week by the Washington Post.”

Trump’s blatant efforts to boost profits of energy companies is unconscionable. The U.S. exports more oil and gas than it consumes. Once more the president shows why an impeachment movement must not be delayed.

LANGE WINCKLER Lodi

Math doesn’t work on tax cut

Editor: Sorry, but the Republican tax cut math doesn’t work. Cutting the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 20 percent and phasing out the estate tax on inheritances creates a massive shortfall in revenues — $5.5 trillion over 10 years.

The Republicans have proposed eliminating deductions from worthy and popular tax breaks millions of individual taxpayers enjoy. Somebody has got to pay for the Republican corporate tax giveaway.

In fact, nearly one-third of middle-class families earning between $50,000 and $160,000 would face a higher tax bill as soon as 2018. You’re not in that earnings bracket, are you? And in other news, the sexual allegations against the Groper in Chief, Donald Trump, and other politicians, are just the tip of the iceberg.

RON LOWE Nevada City