Letters on school vouchers, corporate taxes, Pompeo

The absurdity of school vouchers

I am tired of tolerating the absurdity of a school voucher system. Let’s look at the nuts and bolts of how a program like this might work.

The way I understand it, a system like this would give government money to families who could then use that money to buy private school entrance. The schools would set their own tuition (depending on how many of us poor people they would like to keep out), and they could teach their own curriculum as long as they met the basic teaching requirements established by the state or federal government. The public education system would then be shorted the money that went to vouchers.

So that means any group of people could establish their own school. That is, Catholics could have their own school. Republicans, Democrats, Muslims, Wiccan, Satanists or any other group of people could constitutionally establish their own school and could teach their own doctrines – all with government money. There would be nothing to stop them from disseminating abnormal teachings outside the norms and mores of our society.

As things stand with our current public school system, most of us go to the same schools, learn the same principles and make lifelong friends. This process binds us together as Americans and gives our country a unification and cohesion not found in any other place in the world.

End corporate tax

President-elect Donald Trump deserves accolades for his proposal to reduce the corporate income tax rate to 15 percent, but he does not go far enough. The tax should be completely eliminated.

Like all other business expenses, income taxes are factored into the price of products. That means that, in the end, we consumers pay them.

Eliminating income taxes would give U.S. companies an immediate competitive advantage over their foreign competition, which have their own foolish income taxes. Our corporations would no longer have reason to move to foreign countries because of income taxes. Instead, we could expect a flow of foreign companies to move here. We could also expect domestic corporations to transfer to the United States their trillions of dollars of foreign profits, if those profits would no longer be faced with a 35 percent income tax.

A welcome bonus would be that corrupt lawmakers could no longer insert into unrelated legislation tax breaks for favored constituent corporations in exchange for contributions to the politicians’ next re-election campaign.

Eliminating corporate taxes also would reduce the enforcement costs at the muscle-bound and politicized IRS. It also would reduce the billions corporations spend to comply with the incomprehensible tax code, which we consumers also pay for in the end.

There is no redemptive aspect of the corporate income tax boondoggle, and there are plenty of compelling reasons to discontinue it.

Pompeo and facts

It is ironic that President-elect Donald Trump appointed Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Wichita, to head the CIA, an agency that collects and disseminates information, given that Pompeo seems impervious to facts.

Hillary Clinton has been his personal Great White Whale pursuit for years. Even after his taxpayer-financed harpooning of Clinton over Benghazi produced findings that again exonerated her, Pompeo blithely wrote his own dissenting report, creating his own dark narrative.

Pompeo also will not acknowledge the major effects climate change will have on national security. He does not view waterboarding as torture, writing on his website in 2014 that “President Obama has continually refused to take the war on radical Islamic terrorism seriously – from ending our interrogation program in 2009 to trying to close Guantanamo Bay.”

Pompeo suggested that Muslims must go around denouncing Muslim terrorism or else they are “potentially complicit in these acts, and more importantly still, in those that may well follow.” Meanwhile, the actions of white supremacists, about which Pompeo is curiously mute, are far more frequent and damaging. Pompeo sees Iran as “the world’s largest state-sponsor of terrorism,” ignoring our shameful contributions to the growth of such groups.

This story was originally published January 19, 2017 at 5:03 AM with the headline "Letters on school vouchers, corporate taxes, Pompeo."