PAVEMENT BEFORE ANY MORE PAY RAISESBy David G Hanger
April 21, 2022
Let’s start with your pay raises. Stick that notion where the sun don’t shine. You get medical coverage, entry into PERS and other state retirement programs, all kinds of fancy bennies. For that you cannot even keep pavement on the roads or offer a decent TV service. How many $100,000+ a year salaries are we supporting now; the last I looked it was more than 25 with at least 15 in KPU and that was five years ago or more? For this you provide a TV service that is at least 20 years behind the times with an on demand user interface straight from hell, the most ridiculous thing I have ever seen anywhere, and you cannot begin to provide us with a decent road surface. Fire as many bureaucrats as you need to pay for the asphalt, then fire yourselves for the pathetic irresponsibility in not dealing with this before inflation eats us all alive. Great job, guys!!! Great job!!! Kindly do us all a service and find a broom. A sales tax committee that has not met in more than two years!!! How much did John Binkley pay you? You have this guy come into town with all kinds of government money who announces that he is planning on taking one-third to one-half of all of your tourist business out to Ward Cove for himself, his family, and his religious buddies. Along the way we discover he is hand-in-glove with Norwegian Cruise Lines (NCL) whose sole motivation is to eliminate all local shops because they covet the tourists’ money for themselves only, and they want the tourists to buy their junk, not yours. At which point why do you even want this filthy mess of humanity to stop here? They get off, get in the way, leave their waste behind, and are otherwise a complete drain on the community with no return to the community whatsoever. What happens to your sales tax base when John Binkley declares himself a township? If you don’t think he is going to do that; you don’t read. In the meantime what little in the way of sales occurs out at Ward Cove is subject to Borough sales tax rates, not city rates, so there goes any prospect for pavement in the city any time in the next decade. The key point, however, is the sole intent of NCL is to eliminate on-shore sales entirely, selling onboard in their shops with only John Binkley providing local tours. I do not begin to see any way this lockdown operation of Binkley’s is going to do anything for the community except drastically reduce sales tax revenues across the board. One-third to one-half of your tourists will never get anywhere near downtown, so that much of your sales tax revenue is gone already, then what sales are made will be made at Borough sales tax rates. Thin gruel. The complacency demonstrated by this so-called sales tax committee is nuts. They are clearly clueless to any possible consequences. Nor is there anything in this slackness at all that justifies anyone getting a pay raise. Recently, someone made the observation to me that the wealthy in town are doing just fine, but there is no longer a local middle class of consequence, and the rest are simply not making ends meet. In technical terms this is slightly overstated: There are some super rich wandering around on these yachts, but no local is really beyond middle middle class with the exception of a handful that are marginally upper middle class. In terms of technical definitions, that’s it; but still our recent commentator has a significant point. The local fat cats are monopolizing everything they can get their hands on, and along the way they have totally co-opted local government. So local government spends time and money getting ready for the tourists, but no time or money on you. What middle class there is here is primarily bureaucrats, and the tourist industry owns them. (I am reminded of the story of the Pied Piper.) If they cannot provide us with decent TV, decent water, decent plumbing, and decent pavement, fire them. They are not doing their job. According to some former elected officials our current local crop of elected officials is comprised of a lot of Trumpistas, 63 of whom in the US Congress voted not to provide the Ukraine with military assistance. These people are traitors to their country and to representative democracy. My understanding is that these Trumpistas, as with their Dear Leader, believe Vladolf Putrid is “a genius.” (Vladolf has an IQ of about 120, and only a fool would think him possessed of high caliber intellect.) But this apparently is the current “right wing” position on the subject: Vladolf Putrid is a good guy; the Ukrainians are the baddies. The reason for this is because Vladolf is just another right wing autocrat to admire; the strong man keeping everyone the crackers disagree with in line (or dead). Here again is another reason to not give these clowns a pay raise, but not quite what you might think. For what has apparently not been noticed by the doe-doe crowd are the flags now routinely being displayed on Russian armored fighting vehicles (AFVs), the red flag with the yellow hammer and sickle on it, the red flag of the Commies! Vladolf’s dream is to resurrect the Soviet Union in whole, not in part, and that is already out in the open. In 1960 the Russians and the Chinese were the bad guys, and they are and always have been in between then and now. So in fact our right wing Trumpistas have crawled into bed with the extremes of the extreme of the far left, and to all our surprise are a bunch of Putrid-loving pinkos, Commies to the core. Or is it simply we are witnessing what is known as determined ignorance. I don’t think it really matters; people so poorly grounded do not deserve a pay raise. David G Hanger
About: Editor's Note:
Received April 20, 2022 - Published April 21, 2022 Related Viewpoint:
E-mail your letters
& opinions to editor@sitnews.us Published letters become the property of SitNews.
|
|||
