Breaking News

Local Commentaries

Better Ways Than Tariffs To Help Middle America

The August 16 commentary by Scott Axelson and Michael Dee concludes that “Tariffs are only a tax in uneducated minds suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome.” I consider my mind to be reasonably well educated on business and economics, but I struggle to find any coherent argument in their commentary to justify that conclusion. The authors are responding to another commentary on July 12 by Fred Larson which argued that “the United States has essentially imposed, for the first time, a 10% national sales tax on the wholesale value of everything imported into our country.” The ...

Big Corporate Real Estate Versus The Rest of Us

Recent newspaper reports of well-known national big-box retailers demanding huge reductions in their real property assessed values by Chautauqua County towns is not a new phenomenon. In 1998, then County Executive Mark Thomas and the Chautauqua County legislature saw these huge corporations “strong arming” town governments into granting huge tax assessment reductions that were not warranted. In response, the County Legislature passed Resolution 216-98 making it possible for the County, on a case-by-case basis, to assist our towns to fend off big corporate demands for assessment ...

Moore Proves Economics Isn’t Boring

CHAUTAUQUA—If you think economics is boring, Stephen Moore proves the opposite. ♦♦♦ On Aug. 7, the White House chief of staff called Moore, co-founder of the Club for Growth and a Fox News contributor, and asked that he meet with the president, whom he has known since 2016. “I went over there, and I walked in(to) the Oval Office, and there was nobody there except Donald Trump,” Moore told an Aug. 11 Advocates for Balance at Chautauqua, or ABC, audience. “I showed him about five of these charts about how much better ... the economy had done in his first term versus ...

A New Approach Needed For Lake

The July 4th weekend was an “Absolute Nightmare” on Chautauqua Lake for Burtis Bay, Sherman Bay, Ellicott and Fluvanna residents as broadcast by Channel 4 WIVB Buffalo to all of Western New York. Several broadcasts followed from impenetrable weed-choked areas of the lake now designated wetlands by the DEC. Those same weeds are now protected and more weed growth is encouraged by the New York State (State) Department of Environmental Conservation’s (DEC) new wetlands regulations. The County and most municipalities are silent, “Asleep at the Wheel”. This “Nightmare” can be ...

Standing In Solidarity With Canada

One of the joys of living in Western New York has been the lifelong friendship that we have had with our next door neighbor, Canada. Back in the days when I was a bit more mobile, we would take a yearly trip to Canada for a week or two of wilderness canoeing. You had only to drive a few hours north of Toronto before you were in the “bush” as we called it. There is the well-known Algonquin Provincial Park in the Huntsville area, but we also paddled rivers north of North Bay...up in the areas where the roads north end, and the only way to go further north is with a canoe and a ...

Tariffs Are Not A Sales Tax

Local commentators recently claimed that President Donald Trump’s general 10% tariff constituted a sales tax on consumers. That would be true if tariffs directly affected consumers, but the point of a tariff is to affect the behavior of producers and governments, not consumers. Trump’s retaliatory tariffs are bargaining chips to level the playing field for Middle America after years of being sold-out and de-industrialized by politicians who “fine-tuned” the tariff structure to benefit Wall Street Billionaires. Some commentators hilariously claim Trump’s tariffs are ...