Letters to the Editor | Storm Lake Occasions

Give life a shot

Iowans seem to think the pandemic is over. Very few people wear masks. Only a bare majority have been vaccinated against Covid. But the virus is here and spreading fast. Hospitals in the South are overrun with Covid patients, and we are going to look like that soon. We’re like the guy who heard a hurricane warning but ignored it since the current weather was ok.

Getting vaccinated or wearing a mask is inconvenient and people don’t want to. Stopping for red lights is annoying too, but running red lights endangers others so we don’t allow it.

Paying taxes is very burdensome, but without them we have no police. Civilization is impossible unless choice is sometimes restricted.

The vaccines are not experimental anymore; hundreds of millions have gotten one. Over 600,000 Americans have died because they weren’t vaccinated; exactly zero have died because they were vaccinated.

If you consider yourself pro-life, get vaccinated and wear a mask in public. Support requiring others to do so. If you honor our military for protecting us, be a patriot and do your part to protect us. Freedom isn’t free, and sometimes giving up small freedoms to gain bigger ones is the only sensible course.

Jim Eliason | Storm Lake

Operation Hoop Dreams

A boisterous round of applause for all the community supporters who envisioned, financed, and built the new basketball court in Seneca Park behind the police station. Operation Hoop Dreams is not a dream. I see kids of all ages shooting hoops as I pass by on my evening walks in the neighborhood. It’s a great thing. Keeping Storm Lake Proud.

Carol Lytle | Storm Lake

Don’t bug us, we’re worshipping

During this ongoing epidemic the churches are performing somewhere between unevenly and quite badly.

Some of the earliest and worst spreader events were at regular or annual-type meetings held almost to spite authorities.

Then, when stricter policies were enacted, churches cried First Amendment foul and even sued to be relieved of the large gathering guidelines they were subject to. They wanted to be treated like the God-favorite citizens it has always been clear to them they are.

This is a strange record for a western religious tradition linked heavily to high achievement in medicine, underscored by the personal public health leadership of figures like Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad.

Churches today refuse to let go of theology even for a minute in order to survey what they might learn from history, law, health science.

In the very old days, before the teachings of the great prophets dried up like dew on a blade of grass, religion made an effort to encompass and explain everything: nature, nurture, and nations.

But gradually, as the world just got too complicated, the churches narrowed their purview down to a few things whose reality can be known (like love and kindness), and others whose reality is less obvious (like the efficacy of sacraments, the substance of miracles, and the society of the afterlife).

How is it, then, that we will ever banish ignorance and violence (and the bug), given that the state lacks ethics, and the church lacks science?

Kimball Shinkoskey | Woods Cross, Utah

Family farms and taxes

General tax policy. In his push to make U.S. tax laws more equitable, eliminate loopholes, and shift taxes towards the wealthy, President Biden’s plans for major tax reform are still short of full detail, with Congress yet to shape the final outcome.

The President, though, is firm on his commitment that tax law changes will not see tax rates increase on individual incomes up to $400,000. And tax credits being considered for families would reduce some middle class tax bills.

Family farm inheritance. Tax revisions related to family farm succession are in discussion stage and also open for negotiation. It looks like no proposals under serious discussion will force families to pay taxes on unrealized capital gains on appreciated farm assets (land) when qualified family members who have inherited land wish to continue with hands-on farming.

The extent to which the ultimate sale of farmland would be subject to gain taxes, on land value appreciation, is being debated and may depend on the level at which a deceased’s estate will receive an exclusion from estate taxes (and a stepped-up tax basis). This exclusion is now $11 million dollars, though most forecast it to be set back to the $3 to $5 million range, and roughly double that for deceased married couples.

Lawmakers are advocating for a level of exclusion that would exempt Iowa family-scale operations from confiscatory or damaging “transfer tax” impacts. The “transfer tax” under discussion is primarily aimed to prevent the very wealthy, like Elon Musk, Warren Buffet, Jeff Bezos and their descendants, from escaping taxes at a rate comparable to everyone else. US House Agriculture Chairman David Scott (D GA) and committee member Cindy Axne (D IA) appear to insist that exclusions and exemptions related to protecting family-farm succession be included in tax law revisions.

Farmland exchanges. If a farmer, or a farmer who has inherited land, desires to exchange a parcel of farmland for another non-owned parcel, for farm operation economy purposes, this transaction should not kick in a capital gain tax liability. Most tax critics want to ensure this kind of common-sense tax-deferral exchange is maintained for farm operator stability, while abusive tax-free exchanges primarily for speculation purposes are eliminated.

In recent decades major tax breaks have gone mostly to further interests of the wealthy and the corporate business sector. We see vivid impacts in rural Iowa with Big Ag monopolization, vertically integrated farm systems and farm consolidation. It’s time to reverse these trends. The “trickle down” theory of general prosperity has proven to be overstated.

Jay Howe | Greenfield

Small towns – victims of the corporate assault

I applaud the efforts of tiny Wabasso, Minn., (pop. 765), to push back against Dollar General and the corporate assault which threatens the viability of small towns, including my hometown of Blooming Prairie, Minn., (pop. 1,916). The long, enduring fight to force corporate restructuring of rural America started years ago — one corporate factory farm at a time. I should know — our family farm in rural Dodge County is surrounded by 11 swine factory farms in a 3-mile radius. The act of forcing factory farms into rural areas is part of the coordinated, deliberate and intentional corporate effort to force corporatization of rural areas and secure a new corporate order. In the process, farm families have been pushed off the land, hollowing out neighboring small towns desperate to survive.

This devastating hollowing-out is nowhere more evident than rural Minnesota. During my youth, my hometown was a bustling community, sharing an attitude of abundance and kinship. When bread was broken, there was enough for everyone. The town boasted two grocery stores, local banks, two drugstores, a dime store, several restaurants and implement dealers, a furniture store, two clothing stores, local barber shops, a doctor’s office, a dental office, a liquor store, a pool hall, local accounting firms and other businesses on the lively Main Street as local dollars circulated in the small community.

A healthy interdependence permeated the community as residents bought local products and supported local businesses — long before corporate giants aided by Republican-aligned Farm Bureau operatives constructed factory farms and extracted wealth from the rural area, divided the farming community and created a sick dependency upon industry giants. Succumbing to the corporate takeover that shuttered Main Street in a single generation, local businesses eventually closed their doors.

One by one they closed — schools, churches, restaurants and stores.

In this void, corporate chains such as Hog Slat, Inc., the largest construction contractor and manufacturer of hog production equipment in the United States, opened a retail store to support neighboring swine factory farms on the south end of town. And, coming soon on the north end of town — a Dollar General Store to extract the last remaining dollars in the small town. My hometown — like many other hometowns — is relegated to a corporate outpost to support corporate giants.

I watch, in angst, as my hometown withers and dies. Thanks to corporate greed, dollars that once circulated in Blooming Prairie and other small towns have been stripped, the profit landing on the corporate balance sheet. Dollars have been funneled to multinational corporations such as Hormel, with corporate headquarters just 15 miles to the south and that enjoys billions in corporate profits. Never content with corporate performance, “man is the only animal whose desires increase as they are fed; the only animal that is never satisfied.”

Tragically, the latest business to open in many rural towns is a funeral home. When small towns are done burying the dead, who will bury the towns?

Sonja Trom Eayrs | Maple Grove, Minn.