Chaz (Holmes), after reading your article “Poor will not see tax relief” (Courier-Herald, Jan.5) I am forced to reply. As you state in your editorial, your job is to verify facts. I have a few for you.
Fact 1 – No, the poor will not see tax relief because they pay no taxes.
Fact 2 – The Tea Party, as you put it, is “an embarrassing blight on our country.” You need to tell the readers why this group is an embarrassment.
Fact 3 – The top 10 percent of wage earners in this country pay 60 percent of taxes. Do you really want them to pay more?
Fact 4 – Obama “caving in” to the Republicans on a tax cut package did not add $900 billion to the national debt. This is simply money that is not collected by increasing taxes.
Fact 5 – People don’t go to Moneytree for payday loans because “Obama can’t stomach taxing the middle class or the rich” They do not go there because the Republican Party has passed legislation “further crippling the poor.”
Fact 6 – Your statement, “the poor in this country have never had any recourse” is false. The poor in this country have more opportunity than anyone on earth.
Fact 7 – There are a lot of Americans who are very concerned about fiscal responsibility. Because our national debt has increased by $2.53 trillion in the past 19 months many Americans did vote Republican. You need to explain to the readers why voting Republican is like “hiring Roman Polanski to babysit.”
In closing, I would add that wisdom comes with maturity, with years of living. Progress is not made by belittling another point of view and a wise man would listen in order to learn. Like my dad told me, “God gave you two ears and one mouth.”
Lee Pohlman
Enumclaw
Writer hurt by column’s attack on the Tea Party
The “View” written by Chaz Holmes, “Tax criticism of Obama unfair” in the Jan. 5 issue of The Courier-Herald caught my attention. He states that under Obama’s presidency taxes have gone down. My taxes have been going up each year since 2005. My retirement income has been diminishing over that same period. My own experience defeats his argument.
I consider myself a Jeffersonian Democrat. Yes, that is a rare set of folks today. Consequently, I was hurt by his attack on Tea Party members calling them, “…an embarrassing blight on our country…” The Tea Party seems to be fighting the “Progressive Degeneration” of recent times. They are trying to re-set this nation to where it should be, the peak where the founding fathers had taken us.
The article forced me to do some research. It seems Chaz ignored some facts such as retirement incomes dropping dramatically, unemployment increasing and poverty rising to 14 percent in 2009. Here is a key fact I found at the Tax Policy Center: A huge number of Americans are no longer paying taxes at all, a shockingly high 43 percent. The rest of us are carrying them.
When it comes to the enormous national debt, little was said about the fact that money we borrow today will have to be paid back in the future with taxes.
Robert Gaylord
Lake Tapps
