Letters on Trump tax plan, Fair Tax, pre-existing condition, teen depression

Trump tax plan sounds all too familiar

The proposed Trump tax overhaul sounds very familiar to Kansas residents, starting with huge tax cuts for corporations, including business income reported as personal income, which benefits the Trump family. There would be flatter and fewer tax brackets, so any hint of progressive taxing based on ability to pay is gone. The estate tax would be gone, so baby billionaires can inherit without lifting a finger to earn a living, just like the royalty in Europe did.

For working families, a few crumbs will be tossed with a larger allowance for a married couple. There may be some increased deductions for child care, but many deductions for working folks will disappear.

This plan will be sold with the usual tactics – wildly inaccurate projections of how much the economy will leap forward if these cuts are enacted. We will be told the tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy will pay for themselves in increased taxes coming in, but they won’t – they never do.

What this tax proposal will do is further bankrupt our federal government, which will give the far right the excuse to cut program after program that benefit working families, the elderly and the poorest among us.

The truth is the Trump tax reform will hand large bags of gold to the richest among us and offer working families a small shriveled carrot dangling on a long stick.

Enact Fair Tax

The writer of “Simplify taxes” (April 22 Letters to the Editor) exasperated about a subject that most of us are all too familiar with. “The sheer amount of time, energy and paper spent on trying to figure out our tax bill is outlandish,” she wrote.

I have good news for her. There is a way to fund our government that is stress free and requires no time, energy or paperwork and would – drum roll, please – eliminate the costly, intrusive, politicized and scandal-infused Internal Revenue Service. It is appropriately named the Fair Tax.

It is a tax like the sales tax that would be added to the price of products that we purchase and to fees for services that we receive. Those who collect the taxes would then, say, at the end of each month, remit them to the federal government.

Important provisions would be that clever operators could no longer exploit the myriad of loopholes in the overly complicated tax code. Lawmakers also could no longer fiddle with legislation to extend tax breaks to favored constituents – a power that the politicians will be reluctant to relinquish.

‘You have cancer’

I’ve had the “you have cancer” call. I remember every detail of that call. I’ve revisited the spot where I was sitting when I got that call.

I had to face the possibility I was going to die. The chances I would die within six months were overwhelming. Dying is easy. It ends your responsibilities. The hard part is what you leave for others. All the responsibilities I had would become my wife’s.

Surviving wasn’t much better. I lost my job because of the effects of chemotherapy. My COBRA insurance would have been $1,100 a month (in 2011). I was uninsurable.

If I fell off a ladder, I had to pay 100 percent of the medical costs, because I had previously had cancer. I was unemployable. No one was going to hire a cancer survivor because of what it would do to their business health care.

Insurance for my wife ($700 a month) would have bankrupted us.

I don’t think the people wanting to repeal Obamacare have looked at things the way I’ve looked at things.

TV wasteland

My husband and I are the proud owners of a modern 55-inch television set equipped with high-definition image resolution and 3-D capability. But as we tune in to one of the latest movies of today, we are appalled to find that those once classified as R-rated or even porn are now rated PG. Our choice then is to spend more and more of our movie-viewing time watching old black-and-white films on Turner Classic Movies.

As we watched a wonderful old Alfred Hitchcock movie the other night, we enjoyed an extremely well-written production free of foul language, violent murder scenes and implicit sexual escapades. And this is to say nothing of the often poorly written scripts without a significant plot.

But what upsets me more than not being able to watch decent, life-like movies on our new TV set is what is being made available to children and teenagers. True, good parents can block these movies, but I have reason to believe this isn’t often the case. And as our children become more and more desensitized by what they’re seeing on television, computers, theaters and cellphones, producers up the ante by making films even more horrendous and sexually explicit.

There are still many admirable, caring youth in our country, but I believe we’re already seeing results of this big Hollywood sell-out among many of our youth.

Teens at risk

Nearly 20 percent of adolescents are affected by depression by the time they reach adulthood, and up to 80 percent of individuals who suffer from the illness never receive treatment or get diagnosed for it. I am writing to inform advocates on the importance of noticing the signs of depression in teens.

The majority of citizens fail to realize that depression is more than a feeling of sadness. It’s a serious mental illness that could develop in teens through genetics, trauma, pressure and bullying. The problem is that because depression is not visible, adolescents could be walking around with an untreated illness that they may not know they have.

It is important to recognize the signs of depression in teens early, because any form of delayed help can cause depression to increase. Here are some signs to look out for: feelings of anxiety, guilt, hopelessness, loss of interest or pleasure in activities, mood swings, sadness, excess sleepiness, restlessness, excessive hunger, fatigue, loss of appetite, excessive crying, irritability, social isolation, lack of concentration, slowness in activity, thoughts of suicide, weight gain or weight loss.

This story was originally published May 14, 2017 at 5:03 AM with the headline "Letters on Trump tax plan, Fair Tax, pre-existing condition, teen depression."