Profit engines should help the common good
The mind boggles at your May 18 editorial “Debiting Amazon,” suggesting that taxing soaring profit engines like Amazon is not equitable or rational. Of course it is both.
Government and taxation exist to ensure that there is a way to seek and pay for the common good. With record profits that generate externalized costs (high costs for housing) affecting the whole region, who but government can create the public capital needed to produce the common good of affordable housing? And who should pay for it but those generating the greatestwealth from the region?
You then disparage the money being raised — $47 million a year — as both too much and too little before suggesting that because there is no already fixed plan for its expenditure, the whole enterprise is ill conceived. Perhaps so. But it is a beginning. In your attack on taxation, there isn’t even a shred of an alternative. Just more corporate gluttony. KEN THOMPSON
Shadyside creating bike lanes on very narrow one-way streets that are not through thoroughfares and are detached from one another. These streets require a biker to walk across very large intersections in the middle and then continue on the next street to the next to the next.
The streets are Castleman, cross Amberson to Pembroke, cross St. James on Pembroke, cross South Aiken to Elmer, leading nowhere and disturbing these quiet residential streets for nothing.
Motorized wheelchairs and other motorized vehicles use the streets as their means of transportation. Parking is available on only one side so cars, rubbish pickup, postal delivery, gardeners and contractors find it difficult with the present situation. Two cars cannot pass one another so one vehicle must stop to let the other one pass. Children play in their front yards. There are only family homes, no student housing.
Where would a bike lane be feasible? The proposal benefits no one, especially the residents. Let’s hope that our mayor will find a more conducive route that at least is beneficial for someone. BARBARA MENDLOWITZ
Shadyside professionals to advise how best to address the former. With the latter, neither state-by-state legislation nor patchwork federal statutes have provided much progress. Rather, think big: Amend the U.S. Constitution. Consider a 28th Amendment that could read something like this: “The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby amended to authorize Congress to control the arms the people shall be permittedto keep and bear.”
A Herculean task? Most assuredly. Nonetheless, if we as Americans — and not as Democrats, Republicans or any other political affiliation, nor as Caucasians, African-Americans or any other race, nor as Christians, Jews, Muslims or any other religion, nor whatever other “designation” one wants to use — think about our country, ourselves, our children and the future of our neighbors, friends and loved ones, a national solution to this irrationality can be found.
Anything less kicks the can down the road to the next shooting at a school, concert or other public place. We should all be mad as hell and tell our elected officials that we’re not going to take it anymore. JON SCHMERLING
Mt. Lebanon