Collier district voting, NCH health care, State of the Union | Letters

Letters to the editor should be 250 words or less. Include your name and city or community of residence. Guest opinions should be 600 words or less and include a brief summary of the author’s credentials relevant to the topic. Guest opinions may include a head shot of the author. For the Fort Myers News-Press, email submissions to mailbag@news-press.com and for the Naples Daily News to letters@naplesnews.com

Countywide vs. district voting

Commissioner Burt Saunders recently proposed that Collier County conduct a study to see whether it should change voting for commissioners to countywide as opposed to the current district voting. Commissioner Saunders’ motion was defeated 3-2.Basically, all of the nay voters said that there was no need to study the issue since they each took the total county electorate into consideration in their voting already. If we are to take these nay voters at their word, it’ll be interesting to see what happens on March 12 when the commissioners meet to discuss, among other things, Conservation Collier funds.Conservation Collier received 77% of the county voter’s approval. If these commissioners truly vote with the whole county in mind, then there can only be approval of Conservation Collier funding, which was originally given in November 2020. To do otherwise makes their righteous words on their holistic county thinking nothing more than BS.

John Johnson, Naples

Grateful for health care

My 10-mile morning bike ride was suddenly interrupted by a sun-blinded driver. I was immediately transported to the downtown NCH ER. Following successful surgeries by Dr. Patrick Joyner for a fractured hip, broken hand and road rash I spend a week on "5 South."My only regret is that I did not record the names of all of the staff members with whom I had contact over the next week. I enjoyed the most professional care by dozens of dedicated personnel.Ladies and gentlemen, my most sincere thank you for your unwavering dedication. You are a true credit to your profession.Ted Barto, Naples

State of the Union

It was all about shame, shame and shame on you MAGAs. You are all dupes for kowtowing to shameless Trump who orchestrated the attack on Congress January 6 in his treasonous attempt to overthrow our democracy. Now Trump is like a caged tiger. He has only one chance to escape prison for his crimes and that is to regain the presidency. Biden’s presentation was filled with common sense and caring about the vast majority of middle and low income Americans. Shame on you evangelicals for blindly following the cult amoral leader Trump. Shame on you extremely wealthy and corporations who pay a much lower (or none) tax rate than middle income Americans pay. I am one of those middle income Americans who are incensed with mindless followers of Trump.William Pettinger M.D., Bonita Spring

Trump, be a statesman

Mr. Trump, behave. Congratulations, you’ve wrapped up the nomination. Napoleon reportedly once said that the ability to obtain power and govern effectively do not reside in the same human. Prove him wrong. Be a statesman. Voters like your policies on the border security, the economy, foreign affairs, energy, and law and order. America First! Candidly, we don’t always like your conduct. Dial it down. Don’t be petty. Rise above the mudslinging reporters, talking heads, and lawfare seeking DA’s, and partisan judges. Find common ground with Nikki Haley to make sure her voters become your voters. Every vote matters. You’re a successful CEO, multibillionaire, former POTUS, and hopefully our next POTUS. Act the part. Our country needs you to win the election. Show voters that you are their best choice, not their best bad option.

Michael Mainelli, Estero

DEI programs unproductive

The University of Florida announced last week that it is eliminating its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) movement to comply with Florida law. DEI focuses on the treatment of people based upon race, sex, disability, and other radical external factors.  Merit and achievement are not to be found in any DEI programs. With money being poured into DEI what are its measurable results?

According to the Heritage Foundation, DEI programs do not make people more tolerant of individual differences.  Research shows that professionally developed programs in DEI are failures.  Harvard professor Iris Bohnet said:

$8 billion is spent a year on diversity training in the U.S. alone. I tried to find any evidence I could.  I looked not just in the U.S. but in Rwanda and other post conflict countries, where reconciliation is often built on the kind of diversity trainings we often do in our companies, to see how this is working.  Sadly enough, I did not find a single study that found that diversity training leads to more diversity.

Hundreds of studies dating back nearly a century find that antibias trainings do not “reduce bias, alter behavior, or change the workplace,” Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev wrote in Anthropology Now.

Businesses may decide not to continue with DEI programs because of a lack of return on investment. They should focus on building employee capabilities where the investment can positively affect the business and employees are treated equally in doing so.  In education, taxpayer money should not go toward divisive programs like DEI.  There is enough indoctrination already.  But if faculty and students think it is important, you are free to spend your own money.

Nick Blauwiekel, Naples

Photo should be removed

Regarding the iconic photo of a sailor forcefully kissing a nurse at the end of World War II, which hangs in Veteran Administration centers, recently a female VA official ordered the removal of the photo, claiming it represented nonconsensual sexual assault. This caused quite an uproar. The head of the VA labeled this “political correctness” and ordered the photo to remain in the centers.

On social media, our own Rep. Byron Donalds blasted the removal of the photo as “rot within our bureaucracy.” I would suggest rot in the form of misogyny still is present in the Republican Party.

I am a staunch female Republican and also a victim of rape. In my opinion, this photo of a sailor aggressively grabbing a nonconsenting female nurse is clearly an act of sexual assault, and, yes, the photo should be removed.

R.T. Becker, Fort Myers

The Left is out of touch

Someone at the VA has banned the iconic photo signifying the end of World War II of a sailor kissing a woman because it might be offensive to some people. This was subsequently reversed by the head of the VA. However, this is an indication of how the Left is out of touch. If something might be offensive to anyone, it is banned. If that is the case, I can think of few things that are not offensive to someone. How about various animals (cattle), flags, cars, logos, police, Democrats (okay, I will go along with banning them), Trump, Biden and the list goes on and on. I can hardly think of anything that might not be offensive to someone.In addition, this raises other questions. How could such a decision be made and apparently the head of the VA is not aware of it? If he was aware of it, why did he approve it? If he wasn't aware of it, why not? Combining this with the fact that the secretary of Defense was out of touch for a few days and neither the president or the second in command was aware of it makes you wonder who is in charge. The other issue is that as far as we know, no one has lost their job over either of these lapses in control. Can you imagine how this would have been reported if it happened under Trump's watch?

Ron Wobbeking, Naples

Longer view of immigration

In the short-term a great influx of immigrants through the southern border is a humanitarian and economic problem.  Those who favor closing or significantly reducing the number of immigrants entering the country rarely take a long-term economic view on immigration. But what happens when we take a longer view?

We are getting older as a nation and our birth rate has slowed down to the point that immigrants account for most of our population growth. We need new younger workers to replace those who are retiring. Immigrant workers pay taxes that contribute to prolong the health of our Social Security and Medicare funds. New immigrants also help expand the size of our economy by starting new businesses, by increasing the demand for goods and services, and by expanding the labor force.

What is the long-term impact of immigration on our economy? The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) economic projections for 2024 to 2034 are as follows:

The average annual GDP (Gross Domestic Product) growth will be 2.2% in 2024-2028 as compared to 1.9% from 2008-2023. This is due mostly to a CBO’s projection on the surge in net immigration from 2022 to 2026, which increases the projected growth of the labor force.

Immigration is projected to increase the size of the labor force by 5.2 million in 2034, boosting the economy in 2034 by $7 trillion!

Sigfredo Hernandez, Bonita Springs

Property insurance cost

One of the greatest detriments from Hurricane Ian 18 months ago was the drastic increase of property insurance. Anyone owning a condo or home in a development governed by a homeowner’s association are now required to pay exorbitant fees mostly driven by insurance premiums. Some HOA fees have doubled even after collecting special assessments which were astronomical by themselves. The only remedy these owners can use is to buy a single-family home which is outside the realm of any HOA or flood zone. Of course they’ll need to take care of their own landscaping and pool, if they have one. There are many folks that all this was the last straw and, consequently, will leave the Sunshine State and move to a more friendly place with less weather concerns and, hopefully, less worry about insane insurance premiums. This all has to affect the cost of living indexes which prospective buyers refer to. Sunshine is great but Florida isn’t the only place to enjoy it.

Glenn Chenot, Cape Coral

Consider younger representatives

This year, we will have two candidates over the age of 75 running against each other. They are supposed to oversee the “greatest” nation in the world. Between the outlandish, nonsensical ramblings of Trump, to the spacing out of “Sleepy Joe,” our country’s is seriously misrepresented in the age department. Now, age is not necessarily a reason that these two men should not represent their respective parties, but aren’t we supposed to elect leaders that represent ourselves? Concerning the represented demographic, only 7.5% of the population of the United States is 75 and over. While that is still 25 million citizens, it doesn’t represent the rest of the 315 million of us. Even moving the bar to retirement age, 65, you only take up 17.7% (about 40 million people) of the population. So, you have 300 million people who are, at the oldest, over a decade removed from the younger candidate of the two. How is this representative of who we are as a people? Sure, ideologies don’t necessarily have an age limit, and I am in no way saying that older people cannot hold the same ideas as younger people, but can we get some elected officials that reflect our entire population.In light of this, we should set age limits (and term limits) to our elected officials, from the president down to the representatives of the smallest districts. The term limit for House and Senate members has been an idea tossed around, but certainly we should put an age limit as well. According to a Pew Research poll taken in 2023, 82% of Republicans and 76% of Democrats agreed that we should have an age limit on elected officials. Clearly the want for age limits is not an out of the blue or on the fringe movement. The biggest question would be at what age we should set it at? The Social Security administration has the retirement age at 65 and has been that way since the 1930s. Almost half of the House of Representatives and over half of the Senate are over retirement age. Yet we still elect them to represent the whole. What we need is a fresh set of minds to take over the reins of the country. No more Trumps or Bidens who are so out of touch with reality it’s baffling they still have followers (this segues into the fault of our younger generations for this dilemma but that issue is for another time). So, swinging back around to my case in point, we need to elect younger leaders that represent the country more.Unfortunately, older leaders representing young populations isn’t just a U.S. problem. Around the world we have leaders that are from the Silent Generation and Baby Boomers. The youngest leaders in the world today were born in the early 80s, but none of the countries with these leaders could be considered a “major power” in the world. The issue here is that the population that is over 60 hovers around 15% of the total population. Out of the over eight billion people in the world, about seven billion of them find themselves very underrepresented. We certainly can’t control every country in the world, but if we start at our doorstep, maybe it can lead to other countries following suit. For the time being though, we are either going to have to deal with either Trump or Biden for the near future.Bret Tvedt, Fort Myers

Tax cuts, loopholes

Tax loopholes for the rich are entitlements. Social Security and Medicare are earned benefits.Republicans under the Johnson House leadership are calling for cuts in Social Security and Medicare by raising the eligibility age and reducing benefits.The Republicans want to attach the cost of a commission to study these cuts to the 2024 budget. 70% of voters reject this idea!The cost of tax cuts should be factored into Congress’s discussion of the budget deficit.In 2017, Trump tax cuts slashed the top corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%.

Since then, most profitable corporations paid less than 21% due to loopholes. 342 companies paid just an average of 14% while T-Mobile, Dish, Netflix, GM, AT&T, Bank of America, Citigroup, FedEx, Molson Coors and Nike paid less than 5%. Twenty-three profitable companies paid no federal tax in the last 5 years and one hundred and nine corporations paid no federal tax in at least one of the years.Republicans want to extend the Trump tax cuts after their scheduled end in 2025, this plan would cost $4 trillion over a decade. Trump wants to cut even more taxes if reelected.Biden has called for preserving the 2017 tax cuts only for those who make less than $400,000 per year.Losing the revenue part of the budget equation and focusing only on spending is the Republican way of increasing the income of the rich (Republican donors) and decreasing the income of the rest of us.Vote for Democrats!

Dennis Raube, Fort Myers

Civics, history in education

The United States of America has been racist since its inception.

The United States of America was not conceived as a "Christian nation" and has never been one (I am a Christian).

2015 marked a 50-year low in illegal crossings at our southern border. Donald Trump provided the catalyst for the caravans and surge of asylum seekers that began in 2016 by announcing a border wall effectively closing the border; this created a panic throughout Mexico, Central, and South America resulting in the "crisis" we continue to suffer today.

Joe Biden encouraged a bipartisan group of senators to create the most comprehensive immigration reform bill which included nearly everything the MAGA House asked for only to see it fail at the direction of Trump, who wants to campaign on the issue; if the border problem is solved he has nothing.

Donald J. Trump is a traitor along with the 125 MAGA members of Congress that voted to overturn the 2020 election results.

The MAGA Republican party, since it has had the majority in the House, has expressed zero interest in governing and passing bills for the benefit of the American people, focusing instead on retribution against those who do not agree with them with endless sham, no-basis no evidence impeachments, and investigations into the life of a private citizen for the sole purpose of trying to embarrass his father, the president.

Donald Trump was recently judged by historians to have been the worst president in a long line of less-than-great predecessors.

President Biden has signed more legislation (many bipartisan) benefitting the American people than the last six presidents combined.

Our citizens and future leaders would benefit greatly by re-introducing civics, American history, and international history as core elements of our public education system.

Wilburn P. Reed, Fort Myers

This article originally appeared on Fort Myers News-Press: Collier district voting, praise for NCH, State of the Union | Letters