Make a fair assessment of Rep. Joe Cunningham first
Joe Cunningham was elected to represent South Carolina’s 1st congressional district this past November. Barely a month had passed since Cunningham took office when Republican Mike Covert announced his intention to run against him in two years.
Is Cunningham representing us poorly? Has he backtracked on his campaign commitments? No.
Covert is running in order to return the district to Republican control. There has not been enough time to fairly assess the job that Cunningham is doing (note that he has already introduced a bill to ban offshore drilling — one of his primary campaign platforms).
Cunningham advocates “Lowcountry Over Party.” By contrast, Covert was quoted as saying, “(W)hen the … district flipped to a Democrat candidate for the first time in 40 years, we knew right away, without hesitation, that our next adventure would be to take that seat back.”
Clearly, Covert promotes “Party Over Lowcountry.” Let’s give Cunningham an opportunity to work in a bipartisan way to represent all the people of South Carolina’s 1st District before we blindly vote him out of office.
Joanne Voulelis
Hilton Head Island
There is no national emergency
The No. 1 long-term threat to the world is man-made climate change, which is already producing major negative impacts all over the world. We in the Carolinas have been experiencing some of the early devastating effects of climate change that will only get worse in the future.
The No. 1 immediate threat to our nation — and to the rest of the world — is President Donald Trump and his spineless Republican lackeys in the U.S. Senate. Fortunately, enough of the spineless Republicans in the House retired or were voted out in 2018. The Democratic House is finally giving us a bit of a check on King Donald’s madness.
The Donald, like the spoiled brat he is, threw a temper tantrum when Congress wouldn’t give him the $5.7 billion he wanted for his border wall and shut down the government. Wikipedia states, “The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the 35-day shutdown cost the American economy at least $11 billion, excluding indirect costs that were difficult to quantify.”
The day after signing a bipartisan appropriations bill, which allocated $1.38 billion for 65 miles of border wall, Trump declared a national emergency saying, “ But I want to do it faster. I could do the wall over a longer period of time. I didn’t need to do this, but I’d rather do it much faster ... I just want to get it done faster, that’s all.”
Some national emergency.
Frank Flaumenhaft
Hilton Head Island
No conclusion yet on new tax law
Your Feb. 20 Associated Press story — “I Owe How Much?” — is an example of incomplete journalism to forward a negative agenda.
What’s missing? How about Andy and Amy’s income. That should have been readily available since the amount of taxes owed ($10,160) was clearly reported.
What else is missing? A comparison of why the taxes were owed this year and weren’t owed in prior years. There’s an expose’ on tax law changes that reduced the amount of taxes employers withheld, therefore increasing the paycheck and negatively impacting Andy and Amy’s income tax return. The writer briefly says the law changes eliminated personal exemptions and limited popular deductions (could that be loopholes used in the past to avoid taxes?).
So, after reading the article about one couple’s tax shock, I’m still left wondering if the new tax law is bad for Americans or good.
Joyce Welpott
Hilton Head Island
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