Letter: Detached from real life

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It amazes me that the Monitor has never seen a tax it didn’t like. The newspaper’s bully pulpit champions every crackpot scheme that the city administration can come up with. The front page consistently promotes more and more of these projects whose costs are always borne by the taxpayers. The Monitor cavalierly dismisses critics and abjures any fiscal responsibility for the tremendous tax levy that these projects impose on the common man.

Its latest robust and enthusiastic editorial endorsement of a 12-cent-a-gallon gasoline tax hike that will negatively affect every citizen in New Hampshire shows how much contempt and little compassion it has for the average hardworking Joe (“Raise the gas tax? Well, it’s about time,” Jan. 17). The editorial disguises this grossly unfair tax as something that “will scarcely be noticed.”

This is another example of the Monitor’s total detachment from the lives of ordinary people. I suggest that a $200 tax on each container of printer’s ink and a $500 tax on every roll of newsprint paper might be a better solution than a gas and vehicle registration tax hike. It “will scarcely be noticed.”

If the Monitor keeps alienating a large number of readers with churlish and dismissive commentary in a futile attempt to remain a relevant voice in a medium whose numbers and importance are shrinking daily, it will cease to be a trusted source of anything but local sports scores.

JIM BAER

Concord