Opinion Line (Feb. 5)

Why is there such concern over a Kansas City, Kan., school spending $47,000 for a piano? How much is that (or any) district spending on football equipment? I bet the piano lasts a lot longer than shoulder pads or a helmet.

An expenditure of $47,000 for a quality piano for an excellent performing arts public school is certainly a wiser long-term investment than a billion dollars to run political ads, or the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on Super Bowl advertising. A serious re-evaluation of our priorities is in order.

Since President Obama isn’t likely to approve dismantling of Obamacare, it will be two years before the Republican congressional majority destroys it as promised. Why shouldn’t the state allow the Medicaid expansion until then?

Kansas spends $3 billion a year on Medicaid for 368,000 residents. That’s $8,152 each. Wouldn’t that be enough money for eligible individuals and families to just buy their own private health insurance?

Obama recently asked Congress for $5 billion more for Iraq, $6.2 billion for Ebola and $3.7 billion for immigrant children, and I got a 1.7 percent raise in January. Why doesn’t Obama put some billions in Social Security?

Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security need to go the way of the dodo. Those wealth-draining abominations never should have existed to begin with. Is the government your mommy? Save your own money and get your own health care.

Wichita tears down buildings better than any city. We need to restore the historic Leona and Naomi apartments, giving new life to old buildings. Developers of “new” don’t have the charm of our city in their plans. We need leadership that will capture Wichita’s historic qualities.

When a community has a police force that wears cameras, whose superiors responsibly answer everyone asking questions and are fully answerable to that same community, that community has a responsible police force that works properly. But not until then.

If parents choose to not vaccinate their child against a contagious disease and that child later contracts that disease, which during the contagious stage infects another child, aren’t those parents guilty of child endangerment of both their child and the infected child?

They need to quit calling the KU-KSU basketball game the Sunflower Showdown, since both teams refuse to play WSU. WSU is part of the Sunflower State, whether those schools want to acknowledge it or not.

Isn’t a “veggie pizza” just a cooked salad?

This story was originally published February 4, 2015 at 6:03 PM with the headline "Opinion Line (Feb. 5)."