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District deserves better representation

Letters to the Editor

Here in Pennsylvania’s 13th District, everyday necessities are becoming less affordable. Many families are feeling the strain of rising health Insurance, food and electricity costs. Catering to the wealthy, our representative in Washington, John Joyce, is voting in ways that many constituents believe work against their interests. His record includes votes that raise health care costs, reduce food assistance for struggling families and restrict voting access. Farmers, rural hospital workers and working families have good reason to worry. Joyce has not held a town hall where ...

Homelessness can’t be solved by laws

Letters to the Editor

As a clinical social worker with 40 years’ experience in Altoona, I see that homeless individuals cannot thrive in a capitalist oligarchy in which society is stratified by class. Because of serious mentally ill behaviors, they cannot navigate a complex society due to impairments in occupational, social and reality testing. The recent Altoona City Council meeting exists in this societal context of a class society in which it punishes by ordinance those who do not conform to the materialistic ideology of a clean town, rights of property owners and the only investments that middle ...

US better without gov’t dependency

Letters to the Editor

The modern Democratic Party often speaks passionately about compassion, fairness and helping working people. Yet many of the policies they promote seem to produce the opposite results for communities like ours here in central Pennsylvania. Policies such as rent control, heavy regulation and ever-increasing taxes are often sold as solutions to help struggling families. In practice, they tend to reduce housing availability, drive up costs for small businesses, and make it harder for working people to get ahead. Government programs intended to help too often create dependency rather than ...

AI regulations from social media mistakes

Editorials

Twenty years ago, no one really knew where social media was going to go. Facebook had just dropped “The” from its name. It was not yet ubiquitous. It was only beginning to move beyond college campuses and into broader public use. By 2006, it opened the doors wide. There were just two requirements: have an email address and be at least 13. It was a revolution without a war. We can remember a time when we weren’t in years-long WhatsApp group chats or documenting every sandwich on Instagram. But the inch-by-inch way social media’s before and after bled together can obscure how ...

The energy policy we could have had

Other Commentaries

Oil, oil, oil. The war with Iran has oil prices soaring. And no thanks, President Trump, for your other war, the one against green energy. As Americans freak over gas prices, they are taking another look at electric vehicles. But guess what? Most domestic automakers dropped ambitious investments toward that end, leaving car lots bereft of these gasoline-replacing vehicles, at least American-made ones. It didn’t have to be that way. Barack Obama and Joe Biden launched serious programs to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. Trump trashed those ambitious plans to bring Americans ...

Ehrlich was wrong about everything

Other Commentaries

Biologist and author Paul Ehrlich, the most influential Chicken Little of the last century, died at the age of 93 last week. His 1968 book, “The Population Bomb,” launched decades of institutional panic in government, entertainment and journalism. Ehrlich’s core neo-Malthusian argument was that overpopulation would exhaust the supply of food and natural resources, leading to a cascade of catastrophes around the world. “The Population Bomb” opens with a bold prediction, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will ...