Ruth Ward is my state senator due to extreme gerrymandering. She doesn’t represent my interests, or the interests of Newport. She writes that the needs of lower-income towns are being addressed by reserving for them 30% of the rooms and meals tax — which the recently approved state budget lowers. And the amount of money for adequate educaton is one-quarter of what is needed (“A budget that works for New Hampshire,” June 25).
She doesn’t mention the state’s intrusion into the First Amendment rights of business and schools with the “divisive issues” legislation. Perhaps she thinks if she doesn’t mention it, no one will notice.
She says she advocates for school choice. Those choices are vastly different based on where you live. The $100 million sent back to “taxpayers” sounds like a lot of money. It will be spread among many people with little impact. It would be better used to fund schools trying different teaching techniques.
Ward has reliably followed the national right-wing talking points. They don’t have much to do with us in New Hampshire. The right-wing creed pits taxpayers against education, and it undercuts town-based schooling. But the extremists are hampered by their own blind spots.
For example, the budget included vouchers for private schools, and it prevented state money from going to institutions that teach that one race, sex, creed or religion is inferior or superior. Consequently, no voucher money can be sent to a school run by a religion in which women are barred from higher positions in the church, or which teach that the husband is the head of the family and the wife should submit. That’s teaching inferiority based on sex.
Similarly, churches that teach that their way is the only way to salvation are teaching that anyone who does not share their religion is inferior.
I refuse to let my money be used to support religious institutions that teach that the adherents of all other religions are going to hell.
LANEA WITKUS
Newport, N.H.
Forum contributor Jo Levasseur makes a lot of good points in her letter (“It’s very expensive, in many ways, to be poor,” June 23), though I have to smile at the assumption that I don’t know what it’s like to live poor.
I’ve spent most of my life inside the joke that goes, “Do you want the large economy size? No, just give me the small expensive size I can afford.” My kids grew up in clothes from garage sales. I’ve known the terror of hoping my car will hang in there another mile or two so I won’t lose my job for not showing up. As a female in the 1960s, I had little hope of escaping being paid half what a man was paid for the same job, or to avoid bosses who fired me for refusing to perform certain extracurricular services. I’ve nursed a coffee in McDonald’s while waiting for a chance to grab the french fries that another customer left behind, before the kid comes to bus the tables. On top of it, I have the indignity of being hypoglycemic (a spoonful of sugar puts me in the hospital). So, for instance, instead of buying that peanut-flavored vegetable shortening, I have to pay more for a jar of peanut butter that contains nothing but crushed peanuts. Or skip the PB&J the same way I skip cookies, cheap cola drinks or inexpensive juice “cocktail.” Which may have something to do with my irritable attitude.
But my question remains unanswered. Yes, the rich get richer, and one of the main reasons is that every time they are forced to pay their employees more, they simply raise their prices to cover it. It sure as heck doesn’t come out of their own pockets. So, how exactly is raising the minimum wage supposed to help? Young people in tough positions see only that first, fatter check; no one seems to see the long-term effects.
EUGENIA PARRISH
Hartland
President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris were both out of the country recently on business. I believe both these trips were fiascoes of the first order.
The vice president went to Central America to try to stem the flow of refugees. She proved to be ineffective, with little grasp of the dynamics of the situation. Placed in charge of the border situation by the president, she again refused to go there. Even a short stop might have proven enlightening, with more children being held in appalling conditions than when Donald Trump was president, many of them brought in by human traffickers. She would have also learned that migrants and asylum-seeing refugees from more than 100 countries have been apprehended at the border and then released, often bused hundreds of miles into the center of the U.S. When it came out that Trump was going to tour the border, she suddenly decided to go (but not to a highly active area).
The president’s trip to the G7 summit in England, where one unnamed Conservative member of Parliament called him “senile,” was another failure. Last month, Biden removed sanctions placed by Trump on companies working on a Russian natural gas pipeline to Germany, allowing the completion of the pipeline and getting nothing in exchange. He also temporarily halted a military aid package to Ukraine.
At news conferences, Biden has a list of pre-selected reporters (with pre-screened questions?) that he was to call on. Can you imagine the outcry if Trump’s staff had selected the reporters he would take questions from? Biden’s press appearances are few and brief. He promised a transparent administration; what we have in reality is the most opaque administration since Richard Nixon’s.
PATRICK O’CONNOR
Weathersfield
Dashed hopes! Since I was a young boy, I’ve always hoped that I could meet an alien — an entity from a distant civilization (“Scientists consider how space sees us,” June 24). Now I read: “It takes a long time for messages and life to travel between stars and civilizations might not last long … ‘So we should not expect aliens to show up anytime soon.’ ”
I guess I will have to settle for ET.
JON APPLETON
White River Junction