Opinion: In Friday’s Letters to the editor
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In Friday’s Letters to the editor, readers express skepticism about former EBay CEO Meg Whitman, who announced Monday that she would run for governor. Writes Carl C. Slate, of Sherman Oaks:
California desperately needs new thinking in the governor’s office. It’s unremarkable that GOP gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman espouses the fiscal policies that made her wealthy, but astonishing that she remains unaware that these same free-market policies caused the overall economy to collapse into crisis. California’s problems will not be solved by extremists of either party. Fiscal sanity in California is being held hostage by the fiscally insane. We need a governor who can inspire moderate people toward immoderate fiscal success.
And Barry Dantzscher, of Valley Glen, won’t shed any tears for the billionaire set, who Whitman says pay too many taxes:
Fifty percent of taxes, Meg Whitman points out, are paid by 1% of the people. No wonder I feel so sorry for you poor billionaires. Perhaps if you’d work to more equitably apportion income and wealth, you’d have to pay fewer taxes. Until then, Meg, I’ll be happy to swap you my tax rate for your wealth.
And Chris Stavros, a captain in the Glendale Fire Department, ponders the lessons Californians can learn from this week’s devastating fires in Australia. He writes:
Just weeks after The Times wrote about California chiefs debating ‘stay and defend,’ possibly hundreds have died in Australia as a result of that very strategy. It is amazing to me that a few chiefs in California could forget one of the primary tenets of firefighting: Fire is unpredictable. Instead of fighting to increase fire protection and water supplies and advocating a moratorium on building in fire-prone areas, they chose to propose a ‘stay and defend’ strategy for residents ill-prepared for it. In a way, they are lucky that Australia suffered such a catastrophe, because it probably saved that tragedy from occurring here, and it saved the California chiefs the shame of being responsible for a large loss of life.
Obama’s faith-based initiative, Max Boot on Afghanistan, Jonah Goldberg on the stimulus package, and police privacy, too.