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Nation’s Tax Unfairness Soars Under Trump

Local Commentaries

Three incredible what-ifs, one right after the other, underscore the direction of America’s tax code over the last several decades. They appear early on in the 2021 book Tax the Rich! How Lies, Loopholes and Lobbyists Make the Rich Even Richer. Shock after shock, here they come: “If you had worked every single day from the time Columbus sailed to America to the present and earned $5,000 per day, you would still have less money than Jeff Bezos makes in a week.” “If you had made $100,000 every single day since the year 1 A.D. and saved every penny, you would still have less ...

Finding The ‘One Thing’ In Life

Local Commentaries

By J. Paul Lombardo One of my favorite movies, (and its sequel, too), that almost always stops my channel surfing when I’m doing that is, the Billy Crystal, David Stern, Jack Palance Western, comedy, City Slickers. As many times as I have seen these movies, and even though I can recite most of the movie script, it never stops me from laughing out loud when the parts I find funny (and that’s a lot of laughing), occur. There was one conversation in the first movie which showed the soft, gentle side of the appeared rough, tough, “leathery” character, Curly (Palance) when he was ...

State Minimum Wage Increases Show State Values Work

Local Commentaries

As of January 1, New York State’s minimum wage for Upstate is $16.00 up from $15.50. New York State’s minimum wage was the same as the Federal minimum wage of $7.25 as recently as 2013, 13 years ago. Beginning in 2014, the State Legislature put in place increases in the State minimum wage that has brought us to $16 now. The United States Congress, in contrast, has not raised the $7.25 Federal minimum wage since 2009, 17 years ago. In the face of Federal inaction, at least 30 states have enacted state minimum wages above the Federal $7.25. That means, however, that 20 states, ...

Sizing Up The Winter Of 2026

Local Commentaries

It’s a real winter—at least that’s what all my neighbors are saying. It’s not a real winter unless local people say it is. They know. And I’ll take that one step further: it’s not a real winter unless someone who was a child in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s says it is. We grew up in the Ice Age of Western New York, after all. Not only did we grow up in it, we walked to school in it, we were forced outside on Saturdays by our parents to go play in it. We took our road tests in snow storms, delivered newspapers by climbing six-foot snow banks, and walked two miles in ...

Region’s Maternity Care Losses Are U.S. Trend

Editor's Corner

Warren General Hospital administrators were fully aware they had been bucking a national trend. As the number of rural hospitals across the United States began closing maternity units over the last decade, this Warren County, Pa., facility was thinking primarily about care for its ...

Apparent Lack Of Planning Could Be A Problem

In Our Opinion

How do you do regime change without changing the regime? That is the conundrum facing President Trump following his announcement that the United States would run the government of Venezuela “until such time as a proper transition can take place” — date TBD. Coming from a president who has mocked American military occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan, Trump’s declaration was almost as surprising as the lightening-strike operation itself, which led to the arrest of Venezuela’s autocratic president, Nicholas Maduro, on drug trafficking charges. Set aside for a moment very ...