Letters to the editor June 1

Wealth inequality

Wealth inequality in the United States has reached levels that should concern every American. While millions of working families struggle to afford housing, healthcare, childcare and higher education, a small percentage of the population continues to accumulate enormous wealth at a historic pace.  

Hard work should provide stability and opportunity, yet many full-time workers live paycheck to paycheck. At the same time, large corporations and the wealthiest Americans often benefit from tax loopholes and economic policies that widen the gap between rich and poor.

Historically, federal income tax rates for the top earners in 1965 were 70%. Today the top federal rate is 37% and the top corporate rate is 21%, a decrease from over 52% in the 1960s. These massive decreases in tax rates on the rich and corporations occurred under the Reagan, Bush and Trump administrations.

Extreme inequality weakens our democracy and undermines social trust. A healthy economy depends on a strong middle class, fair wages, affordable education and equal opportunity.

We should support policies that empower workers, ensure fair taxation, expand access to healthcare and education and create economic opportunity for everyone, not just those at the top.

America succeeds when prosperity is shared more broadly. It is time to address wealth inequality before the divide grows even larger. Please reach out to your elected officials and demand that they increase taxation of the rich and corporations to make it more equitable for all Americans and pay down our massive federal debt.

— Jon Miller, Kalispell

Enforce the law

Oversight, oversight, oversight. That is the refrain used by investigators and legislators when speaking of the fraud happening now in Minnesota and California. Their claim is that state and local governments have not conducted the proper oversight of their office thereby allowing fraudulent and costly waste of taxpayer’s money, in the millions and billions of dollars.

Here in Flathead County, I am pleased to observe, we have nothing so dramatic. No missing millions, no federal raids, no ICE agents at the courthouse door. What we have is humbler: a community decay code-enforcement complaint, FCD-21-26 — one of many — that has been “under review” for nearly five years — a pace at which the nearby glaciers are, frankly, more active than our local government.

The mechanism is elegant. Planning and Zoning explains the matter is referred to the county attorney. The county attorney does not answer letters of inquiry regarding status. The county commissioners, supervising both, supervise neither — and will not answer letters of inquiry either. This is called management by avoidance and our county officials have refined it to an art. 

This is not fraud. Nobody pocketed a dime. But this is how public trust erodes. It is something quieter — the gentle establishment of a principle that ordinances are merely suggestions, and that officials who ignore them may do so indefinitely, and without penalty.

Minnesota’s millions did not vanish overnight. The dysfunction began, there and here, with modest assumptions: rules need not be enforced, no one is really watching, silence carries no cost. Oversight is a discipline. Once a government loses the habit, the neglect compounds and shows up somewhere else, spreading like a cancer.

To the Flathead County administrators: Enforce the ordinances while it is still merely embarrassing.

— Duane Egan, Columbia Falls