Letters to the editor for Saturday, Aug. 22, 2015

Hillary’s excuses getting old

We’re all familiar with Hillary Clinton’s penchant for blaming all her problems on the politics of Republicans and the right-wing conspiracy. That is, until the blue dress shows up. It’s not the right-wing conspiracy that failed to defend our embassy in Benghazi. It’s not the right-wing conspiracy that made the bonehead decision to have a separate e-mail server that left our intelligence secrets vulnerable. Republicans did not set up the Clinton Foundation that accepted donations that appear to be quid pro quo for selling influence. And it is Attorneys General from two different government agencies that are investigating her mishandling of her emails.

I, for one, am tired of Clinton’s blustery accusations and her familiar tactics of deny, delay, and destroy.

Margery L. Scott

Carson City

Presentation at NBC not controversial

It’s astonishing that anyone found the Coalition Against the Commerce Tax presentation to the Nevada Business Council the least bit controversial.

“Republican” legislators who ran as anti-tax, small government conservatives passed a Commerce Tax nearly identical to the Margins Tax that 80 percent of Nevada voters recently defeated. Now that’s controversial.

Voters were told that tax hikes were needed to fund better education, and that anyone with a better idea should step forward. But when Assemblyman Jim Wheeler and Controller Ron Knecht did just that with their Balanced Plan for Growth that fully funded Sandoval’s wish list of education initiatives without any tax hikes, Sandoval’s puppets in the Legislature killed it.

In the name of better-educated workers to attract businesses to Nevada, K-12 got new feel-good programs that do little to actually improve education, the university system got big bucks, but the community colleges that teach important vocational skills got squat.

A recent letter to the editor summed it up perfectly: If our state government mandarins hiked the cigarette tax a dollar a pack to discourage smoking, what do they think business tax hikes will do to jobs and wages?

Lynn Muzzy

Minden