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AUGUST 26- SEP 03, 2014

Letters to the Editor

August 26, 2014

To Gia, who's back!

Good luck to Gia Arnold. She isn't much younger than Robert Ortt was when he came out of nowhere and became City Clerk-Treasurer of North Tonawanda in time to be called up to go to Afghanistan for most of his term, with the clerical staff of the two formerly separate departments, City Clerk's office and City Treasurer's office, doing fine without him. He came back in time to become Mayor, with his major qualifications appearing to have been the brief periods he actually worked at being City Clerk-Treasurer and his military experience.

Gia has already shown that she understands that representatives of the people is supposed to be transparent in all they do. She obviously isn't a puppet of the ruling party and may even teach the party something about accountability to those they are supposed to represent.

We don't need anymore smiling talking heads representing us. We need REAL people. We don't want people whose only ambitions in life are to be permanently supported at taxpayer expense under the guise of having been elected as public servants or appointed by those who are elected in exchange for political and financial support.

Donna Wilson,

North Tonawanda

Replacing Income Tax with Consumer Tax will restore prosperity

The best government response to the "inversion" of Burger King with Canada's Tim Hortons Inc. for the purpose of avoiding US Taxes is the opposite of what you might think. Rather than club Burger King over the head with yet more tax avoidance rules, don't tax Burger King - or its ilk - at all.

Why not? Won't this solution deplete Uncle Sam's coffers of badly-needed revenue from BK? Actually not. The reason why not requires one to understand that no profitable business, not even BK, eats taxes. To be sure, BK collects money for its burgers and writes big checks to Uncle Sam. But the tax on the burger is passed on to the customer in the price.

If we stop taxing BK and instead tax the customer, we arrive at the same result. But why should we change? Because taxing BK taxes productivity, and taxing the customer taxes consumption - but the customer will have the same purchasing power. We stop taxing the customer's income too. If we change, Tim Hortons will re-domicile in the US rather than BK re-domicile to Canada.

Will the plan work? Peer-reviewed academic and market research says yes. Is there a proposal in Congress today to change our tax code to keep BK in the US? Indeed there is. The Fair Tax Act of 2013, with 87 sponsors, replaces Subtitles A, B and C of the Internal Revenue Code with a national tax on all services and all new tangible goods sold at retail to a consumer in the United States.

The FairTax®, as the bill is known, also phases out the IRS over a three-year period and requires the destruction of its records of "ABC" taxes, except those records needed to calculate Social Security Benefits and to support ongoing litigation. A Family Consumption Allowance assures that lawful residents of the United States, regardless of income, pay no tax on essential consumption up to the poverty level. To learn more, go to www.fairtax.org.

James M. Benentt

Summit NJ

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Cayuga Island Sidewalks and Clean up Related to Jayne Park?

There may be some advantages of having Mayor Paul Dyster eager to "improve" Jayne Park on Cayuga Island.

The proposed improvements Dyster wants to make include an asphalt hiking/bike trail in the presently pavement-less park and an overlook onto the Little River.

The plan has met with considerable opposition in the past and Dyster, to his credit, has backed off on two of the more controversial elements of the original plan - a parking lot and a canoe launch - after hearing from neighbors that the last thing they wanted was to convert their quiet neighborhood park into a regional park.

Dyster is eager to utilize a $145,000 matching grant from the NYPA Greenway fund.

Perhaps as a consolation prize for the many homeowners on Cayuga Island that are still a little unsettled about the plan, Dyster is now replacing all the sidewalks on Griffon Ave between 89th and 91st and, on top of that, city cleanup up crews went through Cayuga Island alleys last week.

That is the first time I have seen work crews in the alleys on the island since the last seven years.

Curiously since last week - there is a traffic counter on Champlain between 89th and 91st. Roughly the middle of the island.

Why is someone counting cars on the island?

John Pinoit

Niagara Falls

 

 

 

 

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