Letters to the Editor

The budget put forth by Gov. Mark Dayton will negatively impact students. His tobacco tax increase is a regressive tax, which will hurt students. I am not a smoker myself, but even I see how bad of an idea this is.

First of all, raising prices on cigarettes does not stop people from smoking. Instead, they just look for cheaper alternatives. Some may drive to other states, others might buy them online. Either way, all we are doing is stopping tax revenues from going to Minnesota and sending that money elsewhere.

You’ve probably never heard of Matt Forstie, and in all fairness, on a campus with 60,000 people, there are a lot of people you haven’t heard of.

However, I’d like to take this time to give him just a small piece of the recognition he truly
deserves.

In response to Luke Wolf’s Feb. 20 letter to the editor saying that those against same-sex marriage don’t necessarily hate gay people: Please, share your insight with the rest of us. I fail to see how it is possible to oppose same-sex marriage without looking down on gay people. Gay people are treated like second-class citizens; I honestly can’t understand why anyone would keep them from marrying the person they love. It is true, however, that you may not hate gay people. What is clear is that you don’t respect gay people, and there is no good reason for that.

In the midst of the Minnesota Student Association’s success in introducing a bill at the state level for medical amnesty, the University of Minnesota’s student government has taken the stage as a force to be reckoned with. It demonstrates the impact student government can have on serious issues, such as affordability of
education.

Whether you read it online, saw it on the news or your professor went on a rant about it, you have likely heard that Washington has an accountability problem. Our nation’s leaders — in Congress and in the White House — are often focused more on partisan politics than doing what’s right for our country. They’re focused on scoring points instead of solving problems — and the upcoming sequester is just one more example of it.

Several years ago there was a report that a driller had struck oil in southwestern Minnesota. Minnesota’s state geologist responded, simply asking whose pipeline they hit. Oil is rarely found in lands where basement rock is close to the surface, areas known in geology as shields. Minnesota is situated on the southern edge of the Canadian Shield.

I am writing in regard to a comment that Dr. Date made in the Feb. 18 issue of the Minnesota Daily about same-sex marriage.

 I would first like to state that this is not a letter about whether same-sex marriage is right or wrong. When giving advice to a girl asking about her boyfriend opposing same-sex marriage, Dr. Date stated, “The Doc believes that people who don’t want gays to marry hate gays. That’s a fact of life, a fact of nature.”

In a Feb. 19 column, “An honest pay,” Ronald Dixon writes of President Barack Obama’s call to raise the federal minimum wage, citing the economic benefits of such an increase with nary a mention of any possible drawbacks. To support his point, Mr. Dixon cites “economist” Jared Bernstein but doesn’t mention that Bernstein has any formal training in economics nor that he was Vice President Joe Biden’s chief economist and economic policy adviser until 2011.

I would like to take a moment to say thank you to the University of Minnesota’s Office of Student Health Benefits. On Feb.18, the Minnesota Daily published the article “Grad students mischarged for health insurance,” which described how some graduate students were charged $950 and informed that their health insurance provider had changed. From the article we learned, “It’s not a mistake.” What a pleasant surprise it was to read those words.

The Minnesota Daily recently published an editorial, “Charging on campus” on Feb. 12 on Minnesota Student Association’s completed proposal to implement cellphone charging stations in high-traffic areas. The editorial stated that “it would be a poor use of money” to install and implement these cellphone charging stations. I disagree with that sentiment, and I believe it is partially due to a lack of due diligence on the part of the editorial board of the Daily.