What are we getting for our school taxes?
Saugerties property taxpayers have been given a $57-million-plus bill for one school year of education. Considering there have been hundreds of millions of dollars spent in the past few decades, just what have we learned? Well, we have learned we are too dumb to cross a street without the help of New York State signs, without police instructions and undercover police role playing, and without (maybe) the federal government passing legislation to help us. If you bought a product or service with such poor results as the Saugerties education taxes, you would be asking for your money back.
A good portion of this year’s $57-million-plus school tax might be better spent building walkways over Main and Partition streets and Ulster Ave., plus any other places pedestrians need them and leave the streets to the drivers!
Anna E. Wasserbach
Saugerties
Fact check
Regarding Donna Greco’s column of last week, while the column represents her opinion, she is in great need of a fact checker.
None of the current members of the Saugerties Town Board are registered with the Democratic Party. The Saugerties Democratic Committee has endorsed the candidates whom they believe will do the best job for the Town. This has included people registered as Republicans when they were endorsed. Examples include Lisa Stanley, Doug Myer and Suzi Filak.
Greg Helsmoortel won the election for town supervisor; he didn’t “steal” it. In a three-way race he won with 43 percent of the vote.
Her statements about what the Democratic Party represents and stands for are incorrect stereotypes that defy explanation. The same holds true of her description of the Republican Party.
The New York Times recently ran an op-ed piece on why people continue to deny global warming when the facts and science have proven it’s real. The general belief was that people who deny it didn’t know or understand the facts. This turns out not to be the case. Many of the deniers of global warning know the facts and discount them because the facts don’t align with their belief system.
This denying of facts extends beyond global warming. To many people on the fringes of their party, including Donna Greco, any facts that don’t align with their belief system can’t be true.
Read her column for entertainment, not to be informed.
Beth Murphy
Saugerties
From the heart
I rather enjoyed Donna Greco’s column (“Two rotten eggs,” July 17, 2014) for the silly humor of it. First, she criticizes Democrats for, amongst other things, their support/sponsorship of affordable housing, food stamps or other entitlement programs, claiming, with no evidence, that “people that vote for Democrats are far more likely to be the receivers of these funds than to be the contributors.” Democratic voters, she asserts, “don’t seem to mind the loss of freedom” that results. But wait, there are two “rotten eggs.”
In faulting Republicans, she says they want “to go about restoring America to its founding roots,” “are independent thinkers” and “want to keep their freedoms intact.” Their only fault is that they “seem willing to argue incessantly amongst each other” in order to find solutions to problems. Seems to me that one egg is a lot more rotten, for Ms. Greco, than the other; that’s the funny part.
I grew up in NYC on “welfare” in a single-parent (mother) family. Back then caseworkers were called “investigators”: their job was to be sure we didn’t have such luxuries as a phone or TV or such. When I reached 18, we were thrown off the welfare rolls because they would not “countenance” ( I recall that word) my continuing college instead of working. The family pulled together, I went part-time to school and worked full-time, and eventually got a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. I would say, given the taxes I have paid, the “entitlement society” did well on its investment in me. And, I’m sure, many, many others.
More seriously, I take personal offense from the writings of Ms. Greco and her ilk. People who vote Democratic, as she describes them, are supporting the Judeo-Christian-Islamic (not to mention other religious faiths) beliefs that it is the responsibility of those who “have” to care for the “have-nots.” Surely, this is what Jesus taught. And I’m sure that right-minded but left-winged atheists and agnostics will heartily agree. And it is the “heart” that is important here. Look more deeply into your heart, Ms. Greco.
Meyer Rothberg
Saugerties
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