2 weeks Ago By Voice of the People
Manhattan: Why all the turmoil focused on congestion pricing to fund the MTA and the critical needs of public transportation described in numerous Daily News articles? Bills languishing in the state Legislature to repeal the Stock Transfer Tax rebate would infuse billions of dollars into vastly improving public transportation needs. Amended Bills A4574- A and S1297-A would generate an estimated $13 billion to $20 billion annually in revenues to the state. Thirty-five percent of those revenues, $4.
55-$7 billion each year, is allocated to transportation, with the bulk going to fund the MTA that oversees NYC’s subway, bus and commuter rail operations. Substantial funding will also aid upstate transit systems and highway, bridge and street repairs. The Stock Transfer Tax is minuscule, about a quarter of 1% on corporate stock sales.
The tax was collected from 1905 to 1981 and funded CUNY, SUNY and the Mitchell-Lama housing program. Revenues generated by this tax did not and will not harm pensioners or cause an exodus of Wall Street jobs. Wall Street speculators who trade with high frequency generate billions of “nanosecond” computerized sales, and those billions of tiny sales’ taxes add up to billions of dollars annually.
Additionally, mental health issues impact our transit systems. Health and mental health are earmarked to receive 10% of the revenues ranging from $1.3-$2 billion.
Repealing the Stock Transfer Tax rebate is nonpartisan legislation that legislators from all parties should resoundingly pass in 2025. Ray Rogers Manhattan: The congestion pricing plan leaves out one very important group of people: those of us who live below 60th St. and own a car.
We are to be held hostage, not being able to drive from our homes without suffering the consequence of a penalty just to return home. Why? An example: I belong to a bowling league in Queens and would have to take two trains and a bus, lugging a bowling bag. Again, why punish local residents? Jeff Van Grover Brooklyn: For the last several months, I have witnessed the dismantling of many outdoor dining sheds here in Williamsburg and Greenpoint.
More often than not, I have seen ankle-deep muck and garbage, standing water and dead and live rats. Come next year, when outdoor dining is reinstated, how are rat czar Kathleen Corradi and the City Council going to explain to us how they forced us to buy garbage pails with covers and at the same time put back dining sheds in front of these containers in the street, which draw rats? The only explanation I can come up with is that there is no explanation. Like Forrest Gump said, “Stupid is as stupid does”! This is one program that should be put out with the trash permanently.
Joseph Savino Fresh Meadows: So, we have Mayor Adams fighting for his political career, whose seemingly entire administration either resigned or is being investigated by the FBI. Once again, he brings in an unqualified person to run the New York Police Department as commissioner who isn’t qualified to run the Sanitation Department (“ Tisch is sworn in as NYPD commish ,” Nov. 26).
Now the federal courts will order a takeover of Rikers Island. I’m sorry, is it me? It hasn’t been problematic in its own facilities around the country? Talk about the blind leading the blind. Wow.
Gregory Coston Manhattan: Does anyone have any doubt that Adams is using procrastination so that his new good friend, Donald Trump, can become president and pardon him? Marilyn Levin Bronx: The person who 77 million people voted to return to the White House wrote this on Monday night about the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman: “Magot Hagerman, a third rate writer and fourth rate intellect, writes story after story, always terrible, and yet I almost never speak to her.” He added that the New York Times’ reporting is “so wrong” and they “do no fact checking, because facts don’t matter to them. I don’t believe I’ve had a legitimately good story in the NYT for years, AND YET I WON, IN RECORD FASHION, THE MOST CONSEQUENTIAL PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION IN DECADES.
WHERE IS THE APOLOGY?” Yes, 77 million Americans voted for a man who nicknames a distinguished, award-winning reporter with a word that refers to a tiny, wormlike animal that is found in decaying matter. Miriam Levine Helbok Brooklyn: On Wednesday, Trump claimed that the Mexican president would “stop Migration through Mexico, and into the United States, effectively closing our Southern Border.” In actuality, she said nothing of the sort (she would not close the border) and didn’t promise to do anything differently.
If you read Fox News’ take on the story, they fail to clarify what she said or meant. This results in an endless number of misinformed Trump supporters, as evidenced by reading the hundreds of Fox News reader comments. This kind of stuff has been happening since 2015 — and unfortunately, will continue to happen.
Peter Magnotta Jamaica: America down the drain. To have a person re-run for president, being a criminal and rapist, must be a laugh to the rest of the world, which is saying, “What is wrong with America?” Anyone who voted for Trump should have their head examined by a shrink. A person who held press conferences in the Rose Garden, talking only about himself, and can hardly read or write except for his name.
We all had a much smarter person to select in Kamala Harris, who had more experience than any other person. Just wait until your Social Security checks stop coming and Medicare, medical insurance and food prices go up. Don’t cry fake tears.
You brought it on yourself. Lee McDaniel Pearl River, N.Y.
: The person or persons responsible for making the bomb threats or swatting calls to government officials should have the book thrown at them when caught (“ Don picks are hit with swatting calls and bomb threats ,” Nov. 28). There is no place in our day and age for these kinds of threats against public officials, institutions or people in general.
This is a serious issue and should be treated as such. Robert Brennan Fort Lauderdale, Fla.: Thomas Jefferson called for a wall of separation between church and state in his second inaugural address: “In matters of religion, I have considered that its free exercise is placed by the Constitution independent of the powers of the general government.
I have therefore undertaken, on no occasion, to prescribe the religious exercises suited to it; but have left them, as the Constitution found them, under the direction and discipline of State or Church authorities.” In Everson vs. Board of Education, 1947, Former KKK member Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black ignored what Jefferson said, exercised his religious bias and proceeded to apply the free exercise clause against the states, disallowing religious freedom in public institutions and schools.
The Supreme Court is a branch of the federal government and did exactly what Jefferson said it can not do. In so many words, Jefferson told the federal government to “bug out” from legislating in the religious affairs of the states. Jim Black Vancouver, British Columbia: For a wonderful overview of world geopolitics and economics, go to YouTube and search for “Prof.
Jeffrey Sachs: West Destroying Itself as Putin and BRICS Blow Up Dollar Dominance.” Every Westerner, particularly Americans, needs to listen to and understand what kind of hole the U.S.
, with some U.K. help, has put us in.
Not that Western dominance wasn’t going to lose its place eventually anyway, but how rapidly such disgraceful and ignorant policies and follow-up action is moving us down the big slide. Wayne Bailey Far Rockaway: Voicer Patrice Perticone feels that the death penalty is the answer for vicious crimes. It is not.
Historically, the death penalty has never been proven to be a deterrent to crime. Think about the people who have been wrongfully executed and maybe you won’t be so quick to say the death penalty should make a comeback. Ora Reed.
