State trying to balance budget on backs of seniors, disabled veterans
The Colorado budget is $3 billion in the hole, and the Joint Budget Committee (JBC) posted its “Staff Budget Balancing FY 2020-2021” document on April 11, 2020.
Our State Sen. Bob Rankin is on the JBC and has signed on to the recommendation to suspend The Homestead Tax Exemption to free up $163,578,262 toward decreasing the budget deficit.
While the law took effect in 2002, legislators voted not to fund it in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2009, 2010 and 2011. This exemption has allowed many owners to remain in the homes they love.
Support Local Journalism
Section 3.5 of Article X of the Colorado Constitution grants the property tax exemption to qualifying senior citizens and disabled veterans. The property tax exemption is 50% of the first $200,000 of actual property value.
The $3 billion deficit does not take into account the effects this COVID-19 pandemic will have on our state. This 2020 legislative session began $100 million in the red just from the READ Act and full-day kindergarten funding. From there, the numbers increased to the current $3 billion.
It is objectionable to place a burden on seniors and disabled veterans because the state overextended itself.
The JBC also recommends suspending the annual PERA direct distribution, freeing up $225 million. Ask Sen. Rankin how he can consider a decision that can affect public employee retirees.
Colorado is required to have a balanced budget and it is important to remind legislators that they spend our money. To add a greater burden on Coloradans, particularly with this pandemic, is unacceptable.
Debra Irvine
Breckenridge
Cheap cartridge trick
Theft is a crime no manner how you do it.
Finally got out of the house to buy supplies, a trip to Walmart to buy three ink cartridges for my printer.
Ready to install the cartridges in my printer I found one of the boxes had been opened, the old cartridge put back in the box, taped carefully shut and returned for a refund.
What kind of low life heathen does that to other people!? How disgusting do you have to be to screw another person like this? How can you be so callous to put a used product back into a box and return it for a refund?
I am sure you are only thinking of yourself naturally, assuming you are screwing Walmart out of $9, but Walmart only gets screwed when I have to take time out of my day to return to Walmart to ensure they get screwed out of $9.
People like you should be locked up. Surely this is not your first time. A crime is a crime whether you hide it in your pocket and walk out or return a used product as new, it is the exactly same thing.
Times are tough for everyone these days, we all have troubles, but this is a new low for society. All retailers needs to be more proactive when accepting returns and ensuring when something like this surfaces that the appropriate authorities are contacted.
Gary Kirchberg
New Castle
How COVID-19 compares to Spanish flu
“Everyone was living in deadly fear because it was so quick, so sudden and so terrifying. The influenza destroyed the intimacy amongst people in those early days of the Twentieth Century,” as quoted from a 1998 PBS American Experience documentary on the 1918 Spanish flu. Take note:
In October of 1918, the deadliest month in our nation’s history, two tenths of 1 percent of our population died from the influenza: 195,000. That would be equivalent to 662,000 today … or roughly the number of people killed in all of the Civil War … in one month. In November the numbers fell dramatically so that on November 11, 1918, the end of “The Great War” was anticlimactic, despite the celebrations. This coronavirus 2019 would have to kill an overall 1,700,000-plus people to exceed the 1918 record. The Spanish Flu killed more Americans than died in all American wars of the 20th century.
As soon as the dying stopped, the forgetting began and was even lost in our collective memory. The reason is, like any other trauma, it is unprecedented and has no place or relationship to anything in our otherwise daily lives. It began and ended as a mystery. It was thought to be a bacteria, but it was a virus. It couldn’t be seen until years later after the invention of the electron microscope, and therefore up to that time was a nonentity. The Spanish flu by then was a footnote in history.
We should count our blessings and be slow to blame because that will be the most effective way to treat future pandemics. In 1918 there weren’t the resources to do research.
Today the Chinese have mapped the genome and there can be a virtual vaccine that can be proven in clinical trials to cut the market time. Hopefully American pharmaceuticals won’t be too greedy.
Today we have the internet that keeps us in touch. All that was available in 1918 was the telephone. The one advantage that the 1918 virus had was that it was concurrent with a world war … so the people were already in a “prepared” mode.
Fred Stewart
Grand Junction