Gasoline under a buck a gallon tells me Trump is doing great

Shutdown clearly Democrats’ fault

My response to the Jan. 16 letter writer who put the blame for the shutdown 100 percent on President Donald Trump: My opinion is the blame lies 100 percent with you and others like you who voted to put these Democrats in Congress. Go, Trump.

Too bad we don’t vote at the pump

Don’t know about you Democrats, but every time I gas up the old go-buggy lately, I see that gas is less than $2 a gallon. Can you blame President Donald Trump for that?

Gerrymandering by another name

In his Sunday column, “Millions more reasons to love Texas, but some reason for fear,” (7B) Richard Greene talks about the population in Texas with new residents coming from primarily Democratic Party-voting metropolitan areas.

He says this will increase our seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.

He continued to describe the battle over redistricting, “beginning with the Texas Legislature attempting to design congressional boundary lines that will ensure the state remains as red as possible.”

Isn’t that gerrymandering?

Remaining red is not progress in our state. Not all socialist ideas are bad things.

Working without pay isn’t right

I just received my W-2 form. Normally, I would file my tax return immediately, but it does not seem ethical to do so this year.

I cannot in good conscience file my return when I know the person charged with processing it is doing so without pay. This is a valuable service provided to all taxpayers, and those who perform it deserve to be compensated. They do not deserve to be pawns in a political dispute.

I implore all of you to also hold off on filing your return until we can be assured that those who will receive our returns will be compensated for their efforts.

‘Growth’ without fixing needs

Conservative Texans are masters at cherry-picking their facts. One writer recently bragged about the explosive population growth in Texas. Our economy is good for many people, but not all.

What conservatives do not tell you is that Texas has some of the nation’s highest rates of medically uninsured, teen pregnancy, children living in poverty, child abuse, minimum-wage jobs, poorly funded school systems and people in jail.

If Texas does not become a bit more progressive and shore up our social safety net, education system and infrastructure, this growth could become a nightmare. No, we do not want to be California or New York, but we definitely could improve our state or suffer future consequences.

So the wall is such a crisis now

If our nation’s border security demands a wall, why did Republicans wait until after the last election to get serious about it? They controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency, and yet they waited two years to address this critical issue.

And why isn’t Mexico paying for it, as the president promised over and over?

Now Republicans are holding the country hostage over the not-so-important wall that we were assured Mexico would pay for.

Worse, while we’re being distracted by the wall, the president and his party seem to be clearly and openly taking their orders from Moscow.

This story was originally published January 23, 2019 at 8:34 PM.