To save cities, lower taxes to the ground
Re: “A road map to save America’s cities,” editorial, Nov. 17
To flourish, cities need to fight crime and keep taxes from becoming excessive, as your editorial says, but it also matters what is taxed.
Tax incomes, and people who can earn incomes worth taxing are likely to go elsewhere. Tax buildings, and people build less. Tax business, and you chase it away. But tax land, and no one carries his acreage elsewhere.
No one makes less land. Instead, allow urban land speculators to put their land to good use, or sell it to people who will. To reverse blight, lower taxes literally to the ground by taxing land more and everything else less.
Nicholas D. Rosen
Fed is responsibly responding to economic conditions
Re: “Fed’s $600b bond buy lays an egg here and abroad,” Nov. 17
Michael Barone is wrong to believe that Federal Reserve Governor Kevin Warsh’s statement about qualitative easing (“I consider the action as necessarily limited, circumscribed and subject to regular review”) indicates a split with Chairman Ben Bernanke. Warsh was simply stating a fact.
The Fed is not buying $600 billion in Treasury bonds in one act. It is buying $75 billion a month for eight months. If conditions change, so will the policy. And if economic recovery speeds up and inflation appears, the Fed will sell the bonds back into the market to cool things off.
But inflation is not today’s concern. Unemployment is — along with the risk of a double-dip recession. Mismanaged fiscal policy has run its course with intolerable deficits, and the G-20 revealed that foreign governments are opposed to America trading its way to a balanced recovery. The Fed is the only institution that can act in a responsible manner, and it is.
William R. Hawkins
Boy’s future ruined by careless cop
Re: “Montgomery settles with family of boy paralyzed by speeding cop,” Nov. 17
My heart broke as I read this story. That poor boy’s future has been totally ruined by this no-account excuse for a police officer who is still on the Montgomery County police force.
Officer Jason Cokinos should get prison time and have to pay restitution to the family. One wonders what it takes to expect accountability from our public servants.
Silvianne Massey
