I work as a videographer for CATV, the local public access channel that provides free online access to selectboard and school board public meetings in various towns in the Upper Valley. This process of documenting and openly distributing the proceedings of public meetings allows anyone with a computer and the internet to see and hear everything said, unedited, in our town public forums.
If you’re unable to attend, you can “get” the experience remotely — you can hear and see what’s discussed, you can see who votes and what gets passed, you can learn more about specific issues in town and you can identify who does what in the mechanics of town government. Talk about information transparency.
Thank you, CATV, for this public service to democracy.
RICHARD NEUGASS
Norwich
Dick Tracy’s recent Forum letter mistakenly claims that “the cost of all taxation is passed onto the consumer” (“The Democrats are being misleading on corporate taxes,” Jan. 25). The writer assumes that corporate budgets have a set balance between costs and prices with earnings held fixed. This ignores the fact that corporate earnings, the difference between gross income and total costs, including taxes, are spent in a variety of ways depending upon corporate priorities.
One of these could be to reduce prices, but don’t hold your breath for that option. Another could be to invest in increasing productivity, and this does often happen. But an option typically exercised is to buy back stock, an action that reduces the amount of stock in circulation and increases the stock value of all who own it, including the board and officers of the corporation who make this decision — no conflict of interest there.
The total amount of the 2017 tax cuts is estimated to be about $1.5 trillion and included a cut in the corporate rate from 35% to 21%. As Vox reported in August 2018, the effect on stock buybacks that year was estimated at about $800 billion, of which corporations received some large fraction.
I don’t think anyone can point to a consequent reduction in consumer costs.
To the question of whether tax increases would be passed onto the consumer: Even though corporations could choose to increase prices in response to an increase in taxes, they operate in a globally competitive marketplace and would more likely be forced to accommodate an increase in taxes in other ways, perhaps including reducing their stock buybacks.
By the way, we consumers should try to enjoy our portion of the 2017 tax cuts quickly since, contrary to the everlasting corporate benefits, ours fade and disappear completely in 2025.
ANDREW DAUBENSPECK
Lebanon
The opposition by Govs. Chris Sununu and Phil Scott to a regional pact to make transportation more environmentally friendly is disgraceful. There is a climate emergency and 40% of the greenhouse gases emitted in the 12 states proposing this pact come from transportation. Approving this pact could reduce these pollutants by 25% within 10 years.
Why do our governors want to torpedo this important initiative? They say it’s because gas prices might increase by 5 cents to 17 cents per gallon in 2022. Puh-lease. Gas prices change by this much almost weekly. Even if you could really measure such a small price change two years from now, someone driving 50 miles and consuming two gallons of gas every day would spend $3 to $10 more per month. This is not too high a price.
For those who can’t afford $3 a month, let’s find other ways to make life more affordable. How about addressing health care costs or being more generous with food stamps?
Don’t sacrifice our planet and embarrass our states with your lame political stunts, governors.
DAVID ALLEN
White River Junction
In her recent Forum letter, Patricia Henderson expresses the concern of many citizens about how to deal with long-lived nuclear waste (“The problem with nuclear power is semi-eternal,” Jan. 25).
The waste in question is Plutonium-239, with a half-life of 24,110 years, and is a byproduct of the enriched uranium fuel cycle employed in all of the roughly 100 nuclear reactors operating today in the U.S. This particularly inefficient and dirty fuel cycle made sense in the 1960s for the limited and highly specialized needs of powering submarines, but we were short-sighted in essentially just scaling up small naval reactor designs for electric utility service over the last 50 years without resolving the radioactive waste disposal issue.
That said, we long ago demonstrated alternative nuclear fission reactor fuel cycles generating much smaller waste streams with much shorter half-lives. Some of these alternative cycles can use existing plutonium waste as the fissile fuel itself, generating carbon-free electricity while efficiently and effectively “burning” our nuclear waste stockpiles.
Our imperative task ahead is to de-carbonize our energy and transportation portfolio as rapidly and completely as humanly possible. Solar, wind and hydro power each and collectively have characteristics that render them incomplete as replacements for our existing coal- and gas-fired power plants. Advanced fission power plants are the safe and sufficient complement to renewables for building a robust, sustainable grid, and they promise an answer to our present nuclear waste situation.
We need to set aside long-unquestioned beliefs about the supposedly intractable problems of nuclear power and better inform ourselves.
DODD STACY
Etna