A vote for productivity

The Greater Columbus Home Builders Association strongly endorses the “Thaw the Freeze” initiative on this November’s ballot to retire the current antiquated property tax freeze system. A Fair Market Value Tax will help bolster our local economy by increasing consumers’ willingness to purchase and improve their homes, thusly creating more jobs in Columbus.

The current property tax structure puts a disproportionate burden on anyone purchasing a new home in Columbus. Approximately 16% of new property taxes subsidize those who pay well below their fair market share. Thawing the Freeze allows existing homeowners to keep their current property tax freeze, while ushering in a more equitable property tax structure for new homeowners in Columbus.

Voting “Yes” to Thaw the Freeze will also have a direct and positive impact on the creation of jobs that affect families throughout our community. The homebuilding industry is a major economic stimulator and indicator for any local economy. Home sales affect blue collar and professional jobs alike. Our outdated system inhibits home sales and stunts the demand for new or renovated homes. Columbus had a 2.5% real estate transfer rate last year, which was third lowest in the state of Georgia. This rate is ridiculous for such a dynamic and proud city. When local industries like homebuilding and real estate are stagnated, the effects reverberate throughout the local economy. Thawing the Freeze will help reverse this stagnation.

Reach out to friends to let them know how important it is we seize this opportunity to Thaw the Freeze and retire the current archaic tax policy that inhibits both growth and productivity in Columbus. Vote “Yes” to Thaw the Freeze.

Complicity in evil

Anti-Catholic bigotry has been woven into our Republic since its founding. John Jay, a founding father while governor of New York before the Legislature conceded that full civil liberty was extended to all Americans of any faith "except the professors of the religion of the Church of Rome." Abraham Lincoln to Jousha Speed - "when the Know Nothings get control,{the Declaration of Independence will read} 'all men are created equal except Negroes, foreigners and Catholics.''' In 1929 Albert Smith may have lost the election because he was Catholic. Historian Arthur Schlesigner called anti-Catholicism "the deepest bias in the history of the American people."

The bigotry voiced by Mrs. Clinton and her political operatives, John Podesta and Jennifer Palmieri, both Catholics, has reached a new low.

Their open staunch support for abortion, repression of religious liberty, destructive embryonic stem cell research and same-sex "marriage" are against the teachings of the Catholic Church. Catholics cannot support such intrinsic evil -- "acts incompatible with love of God and neighbor and can never under any circumstance be morally justified.” (Bishop T. Paprocki, Diocese of Springfield).

Issues of prudential judgment, such as immigration reform, health care, the economy and terrorism are not morally equivalent to issues involving intrinsic evil.

According to the Washington Post and ABC news poll, 61% of Catholics will vote for Mrs. Clinton. Catholics are called to live their faith both in private and public. We should recall the words of the German martyred Lutheran Minister Dietrich Bonhoeffer: "We must also remember that silence in the face of evil is evil itself. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act."

Helpful

Just wanted to say thank you to Mr. Nix and the editorial board for the excellent rundown of state amendments in Friday's paper. Distilling legal and political proposals into digestible information can be rough work, but is absolutely essential.

Revealing report

Review of Frontline’s bio-doc of Clinton and Trump on GPTV, 9/27: deep understanding of these iconic, tired politicians. How Hillary has remained a Democratic liberal while becoming an establishment, mainstream politician. Her first motivation has always been the many dangerous inequalities that damage U.S. society. But people do not seem to love her the way they do Bernie Sanders with his uncorrupted Democratic socialism, or even Jon Stewart.

The documentary was even more revealing of Drumpf’s darkness:

(1) That his main mentor was the totally immoral Roy Cohn, the New York lawyer who defended mafia criminals and assisted Joseph McCarthy in his hunt for imaginary communist traitors. The dark and contradictory Cohn is described in Wikipedia as an anti-Semitic Jew and a homophobic gay who died of AIDS. From Cohn D.T. says he learned to never admit fault, always attack, and do everything possible to destroy anyone brave enough to stand in his way.

(2) That he borrowed so much from New York banks they were forced to save him from total bankruptcy when all his initiatives crashed and burned -- the banks themselves had made him “too big to fail.“

(3) That he is worse than the fascist many already knew him to be, and is really such a self-absorbed narcissist that he is capable only of eroticism and self-aggrandizement -- incapable of compassion, of admitting weakness, of telling the truth, or even of smiling. He still refuses to admit grappling full force onto the “Birther” lie. He probably never believed it himself, but rather grabbed it in order to attract the racist vote. Drumpf has proven himself time and again to be truly demonic.

This story was originally published October 20, 2016 at 4:10 PM with the headline "A vote for productivity."