Readers Write: Nov. 13

Tired of supporting top 1 percent

Why are we allowing tax breaks, proposing tax reform, cutting regulations, and ruling against worker protections? Let me translate the above sentence; tax breaks are loopholes which benefit the wealthy, tax reform cuts eliminate the top tax rate, regulations protect our planet from pollution, and worker protections eliminate slave-labor conditions. We hear that we can’t keep our Social Security solvent; we need, they say, to cut entitlements. We can no longer assist the people with food stamps. Congress is convinced that raising the minimum wage will tank the economy. Business, if allowed to operate in a free market, will protect its workers and will pay a fair wage, or so we are told.

I, for one, am tired of carrying the top 1 percent, as they get tax breaks, lower tax rates, can pollute, and treat their employees like slaves. We can no longer afford the top 1 percent.

DAVE FEDACK, DOUGLASVILLE

Election protesters should be imprisoned

I am disgusted and outraged by the various reactions to the presidential election. All protesters who set anything on fire should be arrested and serve a jail sentence. Students who exhibit such behavior should be expelled from whatever college or university made the mistake of admitting them. We saw no such conduct either time President Obama was elected.

Anyone whining over how Trump will supposedly treat minorities can get a grip, and that applies doubly to illegal immigrants who have no business demanding in-state tuition or anything else, as they have no right to be here in the first place.

CINDY CLARK, DECATUR

Honesty would have gone long way for Clinton

When I was in elementary school, I remember a speaker telling us, “Be yourself, you can’t be anyone else.” I spent years trying to understand what he meant, largely because kids never try to be something they aren’t. Kids are honest that way. It is only adults who pretend otherwise.

Now that I am an old man, I appreciate that admonition even more. Honesty in all things, even when it is brutal and it hurts, is far better than lies in any form. Far too often we human beings prefer a comfortable lie to a painful truth. Try that and you end up like Hillary Clinton, who reminds me of a line from McBeth: “Pretend the flower, but be the snake beneath it.”

RON SLADE SR., COVINGTON

Ballot amendment wording very misleading

I have always viewed amendments on election day as simply asking, “Do you like puppies?”

As reported in the AJC, the ballot question is written by the sponsoring proponent of the amendment. It took money and heavy advertising to defeat the first question with regard to state takeover of schools.

Excepting the few people that read your paper or watch “The Georgia Gang” on Sunday mornings, the questions were seen for the first time by the voter standing in front of the voting machine. I’d like to see one amendment on the next ballot, written once by the proponent and once by the opponent, to see how the voting goes.

Then maybe the next time the ballot question is “Do you like puppies?”, it will also ask if you want to let a bunch of cronies review the conduct of our judges.

JAY BROWER, ATLANTA

How did media get it so wrong?

I find it most interesting that, over the duration of the 2016 presidential race, thousands of members of the media, pundits, cartoonists, pollsters, and a myriad of other purported “experts” spent millions of hours analyzing, dissecting, and critiquing what the outcome of the election would be. And yet, the majority of them, with all that information on hand, called it wrong. My guess is that Winston Churchill would say, and a quote that might be the epitaph for this election, could be, “Never in the course of human events have so many been paid so much to be so wrong.”

KEVIN PROCHASKA, KENNESAW