Readers
Dammed Arizona raising hell in Midwest
The recent flooding in the Midwest reminded me of an issue that we’ve not heard much of lately, i.e., the Glen Canyon Dam.
Every year, millions of gallons of water evaporate from the lake created by the dam, evaporate and go East, where a good portion falls on the Midwest.
It is highly likely that if that damn dam were decommisioned and the Colorado River allowed to be a river instead of a dam, there would be a major drop in excess rains and snows in the affected states.
That might even help with some of the drought conditions out here in the American West. Gee. Ya think?
Barbara Young
bookseller
Tubac
Recreational drug tax can put U.S. in business
By taxing heroin, cocaine and marijuana, we can eradicate our national debt and pay off the Chinese.
We need to face the issue of substance use with some intelligence.
Cletis Harry Beegle
Homework shows jobless data are off
In his Saturday column (“Arizona housing myths and facts”), Robert Robb unfortunately uses the wrong data to justify his belief that our economy is faring better than others.
Everything around us says the sky is falling, with the best barometer being the dramatic drop in Arizona state tax collections.
Robb, however, notes that although Arizona’s unemployment rate has grown 3 percent in the last year, it still trails the national average. This statistic comes from the Department of Labor monthly household telephone survey.
The Department of Labor also surveys employers regarding employment. Economists consider this survey to be a better indicator of economic activity.
Here, the answer is clear, and Robb’s data are off. Arizona lost 178,000 jobs from February 2008 to February 2009, 6.7 percent of all nonfarm establishment employment. That’s the worst figure in the nation, even worse than Michigan.
To give some perspective of how poorly our situation compares, we lost nearly as many jobs as Illinois, but Illinois has more than twice our population.
The establishment survey leaves out the self-employed and farmworkers, so changes in the job count gap between the two surveys are also indicative of those employed in more precarious circumstances.
We now have 156,000 more Arizonans in that category compared with last year, and that’s in addition to the 234,000 officially unemployed.
Dave Wells
political economy
and public policy
Tempe
Don’t race to decisions on national problems
The Saturday column by DeWayne Wickham (“Recession a black-and-white issue”) further proves that even though the media and other Americans claim they want race to no longer be an issue, they continue to make it an issue again and again.
The recession is everyone’s problem. It can affect people in different ways, but this has very little to do with race. It has to do with each person’s behavior.
The president should look at the country’s problems in a generic, one-size-fits-all manner; otherwise, he discriminates against any group he excludes.
Apparently, Wickham thinks discriminating against whites is OK. He recommends Obama have talks in the Oval Office strictly about how the recession affects blacks.
If President Bush had talks about how the economy affects only whites, there would have been an uproar. It works both ways, folks.
If studies show joblessness is higher among blacks, what are those people doing to get employed? Could it be that some people are unemployed due to their behavior and approach to finding a job? Could it be (gasp!) it’s their own fault?
Wickham seems to suggest that if more black than white teens are out of work, the president should focus more on the black unemployed. As a result, we would be back to filling quotas, the discrimination we all know exists in “affirmative action.”
Lenders were not picky about who they lent money to that created the housing problems.
If we review who took out loans they couldn’t afford, and we see more blacks did so, it is still a national problem and can’t be solved by focusing more on helping the blacks.
Everyone who took out those loans made a bad decision we all are paying for – literally. Race had nothing to do with it.
Obama should never discuss any national problem by separating people by race. If he ever does, he will only makes matters worse.
Nate Baker