Off The Editor’s Desk – 5-3-2017

Trump’s new tax plan may Help us to keep our cars running!

I received a news release last Thursday from Ben Carson News. Do you remember who Ben Carson is? Call me if you can’t.

Anyway, he writes about President Trump’s new tax plan that was unveiled last week having White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus saying, “It would keep jobs from going overseas and improve the American Way of Life.”

Personal tax filers would see the current seven tax rates cut to three, with the top rate reduced from 39.6 percent to 35 percent. Like anyone who is reading this column has to worry about being at the top tax rate. But the standard deduction would be almost doubled.

I wonder if I can give Trump the credit on the number of jobs that are open in our state or is it something that Governor Walker has done? But as I look over the many weekly newspapers that I receive, one thing is very apparent and that is the number of job openings that are advertised in local papers. One should not have any trouble finding a position.

I also can credit Walker on how surprised I was with my state income tax papers this year. I paid in the estimates based on income from the year before only to find out that I had overpaid by a considerable amount and was due a big refund.

Now having a job and having less income tax to pay, we should have the funds to keep our vehicles on the road. We travel some 50,000 miles or more in a year for our business of publishing the two weekly newspapers, one of which you’re now reading.

The amount of money it takes to keep a vehicle running jumped out in front of me last week when I had a problem with my five-year-old Jeep with some 66,000 miles on it. One day I opened the driver’s door and the horn sounded and kept sounding for 30 seconds. I could not stop it, no matter what I tried. Every time a door was opened, the horn blasted for those 30 seconds. What a obnoxious sound, especially at 6:30 in the morning.

Well, I drove to the dealer in New Richmond on Wednesday morning to have that fixed. Fixing that horn and a couple of other small items took about $900. But, have you looked at the price of new vehicles? Fixing the old one was about the same as a couple monthly payments on a new one, so I had it fixed. I also have a Chevrolet Suburban and have owned about ten Suburbans over the past 40 years. The first one that I purchased was from Anderson’s Chevrolet in Glenwood City in 1976, it had a list price of $7,200, and now they list for ten times that much. But we could not get our job done if we had to hitch the horse to the buggy.

But of course the new Suburban has much more equipment on board compared to the 1976 model. Most of its electronic items will send you back to the dealer when something goes wrong. That’s why I buy the extended warranty; I only wish that I had done that on that Jeep.

Thanks for reading! ~Carlton