Letters: The cost of not passing an infrastructure bill; Vote out supporters of the ‘Big Lie’

The cost of not passing an infrastructure bill

First it was a ship trapped in the Suez Canal — because as ships kept getting bigger the canal did not get any wider. Then it was a pipeline closing down because of weak cybersecurity.

It is time to stop asking how much will Biden’s infrastructure plan will cost and ask how much it will cost not to have it (Cybersecurity is part of the bill if you did not know it).

Taxes will cost some money to businesses — now, how much it will cost to have the chain of supply disrupted? How much it will cost to be paralyzed because of a cyber-attack? How much it will cost to have the power shut down as it happened early this year in Texas? How much it will cost to have to evacuate because a water tank or a pipe broke?

And, most important, the money lost to taxes is a predictable steady flow. Money lost to infrastructure failures will be sudden and all at once. It is the difference between giving ten gallons of blood over the years at a pint each time and losing one gallon all of a sudden. The first is an inconvenience, the second will kill you.

Please tell that to Senator Toomey: We need the infrastructure bill.

Vote out supporters of the ‘Big Lie’

What will it take to settle the 2020 election? Wikipedia tallies 86 post-election lawsuits that challenged the election and says, “Nearly all the suits were dismissed or dropped due to lack of evidence.” The most widespread, and also the most damaging, misconduct related to the 2020 election is the “Big Lie;” namely, that the election was “stolen.” The Big Lie was so frequently repeated by so many prominent persons that many citizens began to believe it, and now many partisans cite the widespread, propaganda-created belief that the election was “stolen” as a basis for rejecting the election results ... this is not quite a self-fulfilling prophesy; it is self-fulfilling propaganda with Russian endorsement.

The Big Lie is also responsible for the most serious attack on American democracy since the American Civil War. Like the Civil War, the assault on the Capitol did not succeed in overthrowing American democracy but, also like the Civil War, there are many people who still retain the core, anti-democratic beliefs underlying the Jan. 6, 2021 assault. The minority leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, has stated that he is 100 percent focused on stopping Biden’s administration. Some partisans are now trying to undo some of the post-1960 gains in voter’s rights, citing the Big Lie and its spurious offspring, “election security,” as their justification.

Let’s vote out the elected officials who support the Big Lie, who want to disenfranchise voters, and who practice self-serving and party-centered obstructionism instead of government “for the people.”

Review of voting systems

In February, state Senator Jake Corman said on WPSU that he planned to check with other states to determine the best voting system for Pennsylvania.

This shouldn’t be difficult to do for a person who likes to travel the country for political purposes. We assume Senator Corman will have surveyed the widest range of states and will report to all of us real soon.

We should all be especially interested to learn if our Senator checked with Oregon and Colorado. As was publicly pointed out in CDT letters, both states use 100% mail-in voting. The people love it, there is no fraud and the overall cost per capita is the lowest in the nation. If there is a better system out there, we trust Senator Corman will have found it.

We look forward to Senator Corman’s in-depth report of voting systems across the country and his recommendation for the best voting system for us.