Letters to | the Editor
Hog factory makes home a prison
To the Editor:
I have lived in Hardy since 1999. I moved to the country with the great outdoors in mind - but boy, was I wrong!
In the fall of 2014, I learned that two 2,500-head hog factories were being built just 2,559 feet east of my acreage. I was never asked or told anything about it - just that Hawker Farms II (one of Iowa Select’s many LLCs) was moving in next door.
My home is becoming a prison due to the smell. Yardwork and sitting outside is no longer a joy - it has become a nightmare.
The amount of money that has been spent on Golden Malrin just to kill the files is outrageous.
My property value will be lower when I decide to sell the acreage.
I fear for my health and water contamination by the way this factory farm manure is being spread near me.
It’s already bad enough, but now, Iowa Select is putting up yet another hog factory south of me.
We get the pollution, while CEO Jeff Hansen gets all the profits. These buildings are still sprouting up all over Iowa. This has got to stop. We need a moratorium!
Kathy Johnson
Hardy
Minimum wage destroys jobs
To the Editor:
It was nice to see the column you (Brad) wrote for the Express’s May 29th issue. I wondered where you’d wandered off to.
I’ve been to Seattle a couple of times. My dad lived in Mount Vernon in the early 1990s and moved over to Sequim after his second wife died in 1994. He died there in 2002 at the age of 81.
One thing that liberals seem incapable of understanding is the fact that minimum wage laws destroy jobs, and the higher the minimum wage the more jobs are destroyed. There are decades of history that prove this point. A century ago there was no minimum wage and a dollar a day was considered a good wage - of course, a centry ago one could buy a meal in a sit-down restaurant for a quarter.
Whe I was but a lad nearly all gas stations were full-service and had a person - usually a man - who came out, pumped the gas, washed the windows, checked the tire pressures, and checked the oil, brake fluid and battery levels. The minimum wage went up and that job went away along with the people who did it; today “full service,” if and when it’s even available, is an extra-cost option and is done by a mechanic whose primary job is working on cars.
Now, of course, customers are expected to pump their own gas, check their own tires, wash their own windows and check their own oil, batteries and brakes. Except in Oregon, where there is - or at least was, it’s been nearly 15 years - a state law that forbids customers from pumping their own gas.
Those who keep pressing to raise the minimum wage might consider the recent invention of kiosks where customers can order and pay for their fast-food meals (and other things), and of automated grills that eliminate the ‘burger flipper.’ Those kiosks and automated grills don’t need breaks (except for cleaning and maintenance), aren’t limited to eight-hour days, aren’t paid over-time (they’re not paid at all), always show up on time for work, and don’t take time off or vacations or go on strike. The newly remodeled McDonald’s in Red Oak has such a kiosk.
All raising the minimum wage really does is devalue the dollar. The value of the work being performed is the same, it just costs more. If the job costs the employer more than the job is worth to the employer, the job gets eliminated.
By the way, Seattle’s $15/hour minimum wage just means you’re pikers up there. Your minimum wage should be at least $150,000 an hour. That way everybody would make at least a million dollars a day. Of course, a loaf of bread would cost about fifty thousand dollars, which illustrates my earlier point about devaluing the dollar.
I found Seattle’s imposition of that “head tax” amusing, because the city obviously believes that companies are incapable of moving outside the city - or reducing their ‘head count’ - to escape the tax, despite decades of history that shows that companies move around, a lot. By the way, the U.S. Constitution specificaly forbids a capitation tax, which is what a ‘head tax’ is, literally; it might be interesting to challenge Seattle’s ‘head tax’ on Constitutional grounds, if only to see the judges twist and torture the plain words in the Constitution to keep that tax intact. You did note that Amazon was looking elsewhere to build another headquarters (and demanding a lot of “perks” from the localities that want to attract it), apparently Seattle doesn’t believe Amazon will move; that belief may be unfounded. Cities do the same thing with property taxes, raising them to obscene levels that cause owners to move elsewhere and simply abandon their properties; I’m sure Seattle has a lot of such properties.
Politicians and bureacrats always assume that whatever they do will have no effect on peoples’ behavior - despite over a century of experience to the contrary. They always assume that, whatever they do to the tax code, people will not adjust their activities to minimize the tax bite - and there’s over a century of experience that proves the exact opposite (that’s why bureacrats’ projections of expected revenue from a proposed tax increase are almost always way too high). If the powers that be in Seattle jack the taxes up too high, people will move away, and many jobs will go with them (I note that Boeing has a number of plants around the country, notably in Wichita, Kan.). Most folks don’t know it and California certainly isn’t advertising the fact, but California has had a net outmigration of people for the past several years (the Seattle area is throughly Californicated; as is Boise, Idaho; and much of extreme western Nevada - Oregon is lucky in that regard because the state has been militantly anti-development for well over half a century and there’s no place there for any numbers of people to move to, Nevada is wising up in that regard).
Robert Ackley
Emerson