After church today I got some office work done, made a stop at a viewing at a funeral home in Altoona and worked at the Blair County Arts Festival scooping ice cream for the Alumni Society. One of the toughest volunteer things I do is scoop ice cream. The five gallon tubs are frozen solid when we start and takes a long time, about an hour, before they’re soft enough to easily scoop. I scooped, mostly the hard stuff, today for about two hours and I have the blisters to prove it. There wasn’t much in the news today. Arlen Specter is still getting lots of ink and most of it is not good. The Altoona Mirror’s editorial talked mostly about the virtues of a proposal to add an additional 1% sales tax, which would be available on a county by county basis to benefit county and municipal governments. They said that it deserves debate. I agree, but the current proposal is a tax increase and that fact should be carefully spelled out to the public. A tax shift where the new tax dollars are offset by a dollar for dollar reduction in old property tax dollars is what should happen. Allowing the local governments to use only 60% of the new tax money to reduce property taxes is a proposal that I will not support.
- John
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