COLUMN Slow-Walking Inflation-Rate Hikes Hurt Poor By DAN MASKIN • CEO, Opportunities For Otsego Mollie Orshansky was an economist at the Social Security Administration in the 1960s. At the time, she proposed Official Poverty Thresholds (OPM) based on the cost of food. She calculated that any family earning less than three times the USDA estimate for the subsistence food budget was considered poor. That’s how the poverty guidelines began. These thresholds have remained in place for the last 50 years…
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Opinion - Page 204
from NICK PALEVSKY Super-Majority Aims To Keep Tyranny Out Of Zoning Plans To the Editor: For 150 years after Independence, government attempts to limit how landowners use their property were seen as unconstitutional because: 1. Zoning laws take property rights without compensation, and 2. Zoning laws constitute unequal treatment under the law. Then came the ‘progressive’ era, in the early 1900s, which brought us the income tax, direct election of Senators, the Federal Reserve and Prohibition – all the so-called…
from NICHOLAS CUNNINGHAM Take Heart: Make Capitalism Work For Us To the Editor: Adrian Kuzminski (May 30-31, 2019) recalls Garrett Hardin’s classic 1968 “Tragedy of the Commons” with appreciation, but closes with a rather forlorn, indeed hopeless take-home message. As I recall, Harden pointed out that, faced with exploitation of “the commons,” rationing provided a workable solution: for example, if “free” parking becomes scarce and is being exploited by the powerful or the feckless, parking meters offer a simple practical…
EDITORIAL Legal Marijuana Will Enslave Many A visitor to Otsego County from Vermont a few days ago described what seems to be a sensible end to marijuana prosecutions in the Green Mountain State. Smoking pot has been legalized in a number of states. Folks who smoke it are allowed to grow enough for their own use. So it then comes as no surprise to find that some people may buy cannabis seeds from weed-seeds.ca, for example, in the hopes of…
EDITORIAL The Downtown That Was, And The Downtown That Might Be In The Future First and foremost, welcome back! The half-million or so visitors who will be coming to Greater Cooperstown over the next 13 weeks – for Dreams Park and Cooperstown All-Star Village, for the Baseball Hall of Fame, for The Fenimore Art Museum, The Farmers’ Museum and Hyde Hall, for Glimmerglass Opera, for fishing and boating and summering on Otsego Lake, for hiking and canoeing. While our visitors…
from CARL SEELEY Nothing Is Perfect, But Green Movement Is Looking For Answers To the Editor: I don’t always catch Mike Zagata’s column, but every time I do, he’s revisiting the same two themes—one right, one wrong. Theme One is that even “green” technologies have negative environmental impacts. This is true, and it’s important to understand and keep in mind. When we get electricity from photovoltaics rather than coal or gas, we reduce our CO2 emissions, but we increase other…
COLUMN Can Only Small Business Save ‘Common’ For All? One of the landmarks of the early environmental movement was the essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” published in 1968 by the ecologist Garrett Hardin in Science. It can be to an individual’s private advantage, he points out, to exploit common resources at the expense of others. In the absence of other constraints, he argued, most people will take more than their share, out of greed or fear, eventually depleting the…
COLUMN THE VIEW FROM WEST DAVENPORT Power Grid Mixes Good, Bad And Ugly Electrons A few weeks ago, an article appeared about installing a geo-thermal system to heat and cool the family home. The subject was very transparent about the fact geo-thermal systems require considerable electricity to run the pumps that circulate the fluid and to provide the energy necessary to make up the differential between the temperature of the water sourced from beneath the ground (normally 55 degrees) and…
EDITORIAL At Colgate Graduation, Congressman Delgado Elevates Mother’s Love “There are no second acts in American lives” has been attributed – some say misattributed – to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Antonio Delgado – as he recounts in his splendid commencement address last weekend at his alma mater, Colgate University – is a contradiction in point. His experience as hip-hop artist AD, The Voice, which he assesses here for the first time we’ve seen, very well could have ruled him out as…
from CATHE ELLSWORTH Trustees Should Help, Not Hinder Downtown Revival To the Editor: In last week’s newspaper, Cooperstown Village Trustee Richard Sternberg penned a column in which he went to great lengths to point out all the various village projects that need to be completed. Included on the list such things as the roads, not to mention other infrastructure needs, and the wastewater treatment plant as well as the Doubleday Field upgrade. When added to this list of needed undertakings,…
