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FLOODS AND FARMS Unless you enjoy watching your home flood and losing everything you own from water funneled by levees upstream, it is difficult to understand how levee subsidies benefit you. Rivers have a natural flood plain adjoining them, but although farmers are subsidized to set aside acres, they insist on building levees, most of them with government help (money) to farm close to rivers. This funnels the water downstream, flooding cities.
When Cairo, Illinois, was in danger of being wiped out by a flood and the Army of Engineers was considering opening a levee to save it, the Missouri Speaker of the House was asked, “Would you rather have Missouri farmland flooded or Cairo under water?” He quickly answered, “Cairo. I’ve been there.”
Another example is ethanol.
This government boondoggle was conceived by the energy crisis of the oil boycott. The idea sounded good. Just grow your own fuel. Only, like a lot of good ideas, it doesn’t work. It takes as much energy or more to convert the corn as you gain, and the finished product has only 76 percent of the energy. Your MPG will drop, causing more gasoline to be used. So, this further depletes energy supplies, rather than increasing them. The price of the remaining corn is driven up, resulting in higher prices at the supermarket. With the U.S. being a Christian nation, with people starving around the world and many people in the U.S. going to bed hungry at night, is wasting food really the Christian thing to do?
Farm legislation that would truly benefit everyone would be for the government through eminent domain to buy the land adjacent to the rivers and remove all the levees. It might seem expensive, but in the long run, it is cheaper than subsidizing flooding with levees followed by FEMA spending hundreds of millions of dollars repairing flood damage. Bill Steenblock Decatur
ANTI WELCOMING CITY Former Illinois Senator Adlai Stevenson once quoted, “There is nothing more horrifying than watching stupidity in action.” That phrase immediately came to mind as I witnessed city aldermen considering a welcoming city resolution in October 2017. Without requesting funding, I watched in horror as select elected officials were maneuvering to hijack taxpayer dollars for illegal purposes. No one disputes legal aliens are fine for a path to citizenship, however, this resolution is a cloaked preludeprecursor to sanctuary cities for illegal immigrants, essentially making it a virtual recruitment tool for illegal immigrants, which is not so fine.
Observing the state of California as sanctuary evidence, these types of resolutions welcome illegal aliens flooding into our country in the form of an economic weapon of mass destruction and a compromise to public safety. Virtual recruitment of illegal aliens using a resolution procedure is offensive, it’s disgusting and it exudes hate for law-abiding Springfield natives. If approved, virtual recruits would have flooded our taxpayer-funded welfare system, draining local, state and federal resources, and be in direct competition with legal and natural-born natives for job offers. America is the most diverse nation on the face of the planet. With that evidence, there is no need for a time-wasting welcoming city resolution; furthermore, it represents immigrants first and Americans last. Virtual recruitment of illegal immigrants does not represent rule of law, it represents breaking the law. That’s antithetical and oxymoronic to the rule of law and it violates national sovereignty. I believe welcoming city opponent Rosanna Pulido and aldermen who tabled the resolution got it right. Tim L. Thornton Springfield
