"Where Olmsted County News Comes First"

28

Should the Vikings be able to use the University of Minnesota’s TCF Bank Stadium?

 Yes

 No

 I don't care


View Results

Comments(4)

My congratulations Jason, on the first anniversary of the Olmsted County Journal. I like the opportunity to spout off in your paper and from the comments I get, a lot of people are reading and enjoying the varying comments expressed. This is the way that political campaign’s should be rather than in 30 second sound bites on the TV.

My Democrat friends want to blame everyone else for our problems. The insurance companies are blamed for the cost of health care, oil companies are blamed for high gas prices, business men are not paying enough tax, Tea party members are blamed because they don’t agree with the Democrats policies, Republicans are blamed because they agree with the Tea Party members on so many things, Dave Hansen says that Republicans are against women –let’s look a little closer at that one.

Now I’ve always thought that the men and women of both parties approached sex from the same general direction. Recently a lady testified that she should have her pills and condoms paid for by the government as part of the health bill. She said that men were getting their Viagra paid for. Of course, I can’t speak for all the Republicans, but at my age I think that we all should pay for our own stimulants.

Are insurance companies to blame for the cost of health care? Insurance companies basically average the risk of illnesses, their costs, and spread them out over the lifetime of the individuals involved. Individuals vary by groups; some are more prone to heart problems, some to cancers, some to sickle cell anemia etc. The costs, however, have been going up with the complexity of the illnesses and whether they should or should not be considered an illness…Do Viagra, birth control pills, or condoms, really have to be paid by our health insurance? Those in a gay “marriage” really don’t need that type of insurance. Is a brain transplant an illness? This is something that the insurance companies have little control over. Don’t blame the insurance company, blame the people that want to have the government in Washington control our lives. Now we have the option to buy the kind of health care that we want -- not what someone in Washington wants us to have. I personally would rather pay at the Doctor’s office. He usually gives you a discount if you pay cash and so far they haven’t bounced any of my checks.

Are oil companies responsible for high prices? The Democrats love to blame the oil companies for the price of the fuel at the tank. Now the oil companies are really broken into three main parts. The fellow at the gas station is usually the one who gets the blame, but he buys it from the refinery. His margin is normally about 10-12 cents per gallon. When gas gets up to $4 per gallon and the card company takes 2.5 percent of that for their commission only one or two cents profit remains. But wait… the taxes on that $4 gas are 46 cents per gallon. The refinery only gets $3.40 for that gallon of gas. The refinery buys the crude oil from the companies that drill for the oil. When prices are high they do make money -- if they have got oil to sell. If they haven’t got the oil they try to find some. If they do find oil they try to get it to the refinery as soon as possible, and this is one problem that Democrats and Republicans disagree on. The Canadian government has been producing oil from the Bakken formation and has more than the northern refineries can handle. At least five refineries are closed now because of stricter government rules and regulations required by the Pollution Control Agency. They have a pipeline half built, but the Obama people won’t let them finish the pipeline. The oil business is very competitive with oil coming into the country from all over the world. There have been cases when a shipload of oil was sold five different times before it reached its destination. All of us are able to buy shares in the oil companies in the U.S. but the returns on our investment would normally be about eight percent. Back in 1973, the major oil producers of the world tried to jack up the prices for us, but our drillers went to work and within a year they were producing enough oil so that the price at the pump went down to around $1 per gallon. If the Obama administration would let that big pipe be connected to the refineries it could again go down to that price. There is more oil in the U.S. and Canada than in the Arabian Peninsula. The free enterprise system works very well –when the price goes up everybody wants to make a buck and they will work hard for it.

When Dave Hansen talks about economic leadership, nothing produces as well as the individuals competing in the free market. Some of our Democratic friends believe that the government shall play the leadership role in producing jobs for our people. I firmly disagree. Governments should let the people decide what they want to buy and business will produce the things that people want. Every individual has priorities, from food, a house, a car, a home, how many kids they’ll have, what kind of work they want to do. It should not be directed from any governments, whether they are local, state or federal. We have economic leadership, the market place. I lived through the depression when the New Deal was directing the economy when many of these proposals were first used. They didn’t work then and they aren’t working now. The Federal Government is borrowing the money and then giving it away in “stimulus funds” to such proposals as Solyndra, the company that spent $500,000,000 to produce solar paneling and didn’t sell a single one. The Chinese were producing them for half the price.

I want to close with the marriage amendment. I checked my 50-year-old law books and there are over 150 laws relating to husband and wife, and another 70 on marriage alone. They deal with a lot of different things, but mainly with the rights of children, inheritance, divorces, such thing as Quaker and Muslim marriages, and 220 other items. I’m wondering which of these things are of concern to gays and lesbians. Isn’t it interesting that all of these laws would become available to those who simply changed the meaning of marriage that is in the law books? Think of the lawyers clogging up the courts to decide who is my mommy, who is my daddy.