Winston-Salem Journal LTE's 12/01/11

Backward?
Egypt extends voting hours and adds an extra voting day because so many people want to vote. We make it more difficult to vote, cutting voting hours and decreasing poll sites.
And Egypt is the backward country?

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EVELYN T. SHAFER
Seven Devils

Rate request ploy
I may be accused of being mean-spirited, but I believe we have been conned by Duke Energy's rate request ploy, an old charity marketing maneuver. It asks for a large amount, a 17 percent increase in this case, and then "settles" for a 7.2 percent increase ("Duke Energy rate hearing set," Nov. 25). After a predictable uproar over the initial rate hike, we are supposed to feel lucky to only pay the lesser amount — what Duke Energy wanted to high-five about in the first place.
Let's hope Attorney General Roy Cooper will absolutely oppose any rate hike. I understand Duke Energy made a tidy profit last fiscal year, and would continue this year without any rate increases.

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PETER VENABLE
Winston-Salem

Sum It Up
The Sum It Up question from Sunday was: Should the government be heavily involved in helping the needy?

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No! The federal government has no constitutional authority to do so. There was a time before there were things like food stamps, WIC, etc., when the local churches did the social-welfare work the federal government now does.

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STEVEN M. HENDERSON

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Should the organization that has been a major contributor of creating the needy be "heavily involved in helping the needy"? Nice idea, but it won't work. Another "cabinet" or "czar" will be created to hire more federal employees to find more tax money for food stamps to keep the needy more needy. The federal government is so dysfunctional it couldn't organize a sock drawer.
The only way it can help is by getting its greedy, controlling hands out of the pockets of small businesses so that jobs will be created, which will in turn reduce number of needy families. A government with so much control that it has created the largest number of "food-stamp families" in our history is out of control.

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CHRISTINE PULISELIC

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The government needs to be involved to help the needy with trained people. There will always be a need for help.

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ELIZABETH R. ERVIN

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To the question "Should the government be heavily involved in helping the needy": 'Tis the season to celebrate Dickens. We all know the story, but do we understand the lesson?
What if Scrooges ran the economy and their stubborn meanness, their greed, tore great hunks out of our financial markets? When the Cratchit children starved, we could harrumph and say it was their own fault. Lack of character. The deficit. Whatever.

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HAYES McNEILL

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One purpose of government is to provide security for its citizens, and one way to provide security is for the government to be heavily involved in helping the needy. Many people see our country's safety net as stretched horizontally to catch people who fall. They don't realize that it's also stretched vertically to protect the haves from the have-nots.
Personal crime reaches through holes in that net. The priority in helping the needy is to make them self-sufficient: giving them sustenance to fit them for work and then giving them jobs.

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DOROTHY MATHEWS

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Many politicians are tempted to be overgenerous with the needy, hoping for votes from them in return. That's why we have 45 million on food stamps now. So unless the needy are prevented from voting, the government should not be involved in helping them.

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RICHARD MERLO

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Is there a provision in the Constitution that would mandate government doing this?

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DONALD R. CREWS

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No private charity or nonprofit organization could meet all the needs of the needy, particularly when emergency or crisis arises. Government must play a major role in relief works.
As a matter of fact, private charity or non-profit organizations are subsidized by government through tax exemptions and tax reductions to its donors. It was a shame when House Majority Leader Eric Cantor wanted to rob Peter to pay Paul in time of disaster.
The federal government would have plenty of resources to meet its obligations if the big corporations stop moving their money to offshore tax havens and the top income-tax dodgers just paid their taxes like ordinary wage-earners do.

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BOON T. LEE