Readers Write: State tax cap essential to controlling costs

The Island Now

Similar to all general populations, the homeowners in Nassau County are a diverse group, ranging from immigrants coming from the Orient, working in medicine and high tech areas, to our own middle class accountants, analysts and administrators, to elderly and retired widows and widowers. 

As such, your abusive and ignorant slander that these groups are anti-tax zealots, Tea Partiers and members of the right wing, is beneath contempt and appropriate of supermarket tabloids. 

The property tax mechanism is a 100-year-old anachronism that is, prima facie, discriminatory as it mandates one class of taxpayer, elderly homeowners without children, to subsidize another class, the parents of children in the public school system. 

Were the Herald-Courier serious, in the tradition of Diderot, Paine, Greely, Zola, Pulitzer, among others, it would lead the charge to reform the current system which many so called “less enlightened” states have done as a matter of simple equity. 

As for the class size issue, a Marine drill instructor is able to successfully conduct classes with company size units (120 recruits), many of whom are 18 years old, comparable to most Nassau County high school seniors. His critical lever is discipline. 

In fact, class size in public, private and parochial schools were often in the 40 to 50 student range until the 1960s because of the discipline that was expected and enforced. 

But that was then and this is now. Any additional administrative burdens created by larger classes can be ameliorated through the methodology of grouping and teaming students, which are standard workplace practices. 

After all, isn’t preparing students for the workplace the ultimate objective of schooling in the first place? Or is the class size canard merely a masquerade for a jobs program? Hiding behind the children in order to advance a radical agenda has long been standard procedure for the hard left, whose poster girl in education has always been Baroness Passfield, a British peer of the very early 20th century a.k.a. Beatrice Webb. 

As the catalyst for Fabian Socialism along with Sidney Webb and Bernard Shaw, their revealing attitude towards the objective of education is quoted in paraphrase.

“Under Socialism… you would not be allowed to be ignorant as you would be forcibly taught whether you liked it or not.” 

The New York state tax cap is simply a vital check on the educational establishment fanatics and their media water carriers who, unchecked, would impose their will on the citizenry through taxation, all in the name of good intentions of course.

 

Tom Coffey

Herricks

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