KCI, heavy rains, improving U.S.

I have read that the new recommendation is for a single terminal at Kansas City International Airport.

Frequently using KCI as my departure or arrival airport, I have extensively traveled worldwide in the past 40 years. I think the Kansas City airport has the best, most efficient terminal design anywhere.

There is nothing worse than arriving at an airport and having to walk great distances to either board or retrieve baggage upon arrival, especially on international flights.

Now that I’m aging slightly, it is even more burdensome. The thing I regret most is that KCI cannot seem to attract major carriers to set up a hub.

It would be nice to be able to fly directly to and from Europe without having to go to Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth, Atlanta or (heaven forbid) one of the New York area airports.

In the May 8 headline, “The terminal decision,” the word “terminal,” taken as a noun, means a future destination. As an adjective, it can be construed to mean fatal for the future.

After reading about a street collapse in Baltimore because of heavy rains, I wonder how vulnerable Kansas City is.

Every time it rains and I drive near Westport on Southwest Trafficway, the level of water rises very rapidly. Every driver slows to a turtle’s pace to make it through a questionable lake of water. Whatever the sewer drainage infrastructure is in that area, it’s not working well.

Congress must start primarily looking at the growth per capita. Looking only at the gross domestic product, which was created 80 years ago, doesn’t measure the national good.

We need to measure which life is worthwhile. We must factor in human reality, the quality of life.

It must be about the working people. Let’s work on this for our nation’s sake.

In the U.S., the GDP growth from 2001 to 2010 was 1.6 percent and growth per capita was 0.7 percent. In Japan, GDP growth from 2001 to 2010 was 0.8 percent and growth per capita 1.6 percent.

Congress needs to take action now and develop policies and programs to raise our growth per capita.

America is in secular stagnation. It’s unsustainable for 1 percent to have more than 35 percent of the wealth while 80 percent have just 11 percent.

The biggest problems we face are unemployment, stagnant wages, slow growth and widening inequality, not deficits. To increase our wealth per capita, we need to:

• Embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform.

• Stop letting 1 million people into the U.S. without control.

• Stop fighting women’s rights.

Politicians in Jefferson City just finalized an override of Gov. Jay Nixon’s veto of SB 509, cutting taxes for corporations and the wealthy (5-7, A1, “Tax cut enacted despite a veto”). How, you might ask?

They’re the ones with loopholes, legal expertise, crack accountants and political power on their side. We 99 percenters cannot win.

This is completely insane. Look at our neighbors in Kansas and what their tax cuts have already wrought.

Education, infrastructure and human services all will be affected negatively, while the fat cats and corporate big shots will continue to dine on caviar, drink fine wine and smoke big, fat cigars.

All of this takes place in a back room, of course. They can’t be seen among the riff-raff. Shame on our self-centered, greedy lawmakers. This will prove to be one of the stupidest things they’ve ever done.

As the world watched, Gov. Sam Brownback and the radical right in the Kansas Legislature slashed taxes and reduced spending to please the Koch brothers.

Now that the state’s credit rating has dropped because of such foolish moves, Kansas officials have started pointing fingers at everyone else, saying it was not their policies that caused this. It was President Barack Obama’s policies that caused this to happen.

Really?

Brownback and state legislators passed their tax cuts, which drastically reduced revenue. They slashed state spending to make up for lost tax revenue.

They refused federal Medicaid funding to keep from being associated with Obamacare.

It’s time for Brownback and conservative legislators who passed these heinous policies to stand up and to take the blame for the havoc they are starting to cause.

These reckless policies are going to continue to cause havoc as long as Kansas officeholders listen to people such as the Koch brothers of Wichita and Rex Sinquefield in Missouri.

Hobby Lobby’s paternalistic view of health insurance goes beyond birth control and the putative religious scruples of a corporation. It threatens the absolute right of any employee to spend his earnings on whatever legal product he wishes, be it liposuction, Viagra, breast enhancements, medical pot, tattoos or white bread.

Any interference by a third party constitutes illegal restraint of trade.

Surely, no employer would dare withhold grocery money from workers’ paychecks to ensure they bought only whole-wheat bread. Same principle. Insurance cost is a part of a worker’s pay, which he alone controls.

In the pioneer days, miners were sometimes paid in scrip, spendable only at the company store for company-approved products at company prices. Civilization eventually arrived and outlawed that practice.

Hobby Lobby should partition its health-insurance money into equal wage increases to fund each worker’s insurance choice. It’s called freedom.

After reading several letters from unhappy postal customers, I felt compelled to throw in my 49 cents’ worth. The U.S. Postal Service lost a piece of my mail — once — 30 years ago.

I’ve never had a problem with temporarily stopping delivery, and if a piece was delivered to me by mistake, I walked it over to its proper box if it was in my neighborhood.

Mail can be lost. People do make mistakes, and we are all human.

Those people who are disgruntled now because of a little inconvenience would probably go into a complete tailspin if this agency were privatized.

My thanks go to the many hardworking men and women who see to it that millions of pieces of mail are delivered in a timely manner every day.

By the way, I sent this letter the old-fashioned way. If people are reading this, I will know it was successfully delivered.

One can only imagine the concerns and many questions that come from the more than 5 million people in our country with Alzheimer’s disease as well as those from their family and friends.

I am pleased to report that in Raymore, in the Brookdale-Foxwood Springs community, Jeanie Parris, a social worker, is helping tremendously in two ways:

• Every month, there is a gathering of persons related to an Alzheimer’s patient. Either they listen to a guest specialist speaking about Alzheimer’s disease or time is spent allowing each person to share experiences or ask questions.

• A quarterly care-plan meeting is held with a family member to discuss the condition of the Alzheimer’s patient. An interdisciplinary team involved in the loved one’s care reports information and observations and offers helpful thoughts. This team consists of nursing, rehabilitation, social services, activities and dietary leaders. This is a marvelous and very personal opportunity.

How very thankful family members are to have up-to-date information and to have help in their time of great concern.

This is sadly a rewrite of a letter that I sent to The Star years ago on a similar accidental shooting involving young children. While not diminishing the tragedy of the death of a 19-month-old, then as now, no one in the reporting mentions that if the gun hadn’t been there in the first place, that child would still be alive (5-1, A8, “Boy accidentally shoots brother”).

Unfortunately, there seems to be no limit to the passion of our country for the “right to bear arms.” Those same zealots seem to forget the consequences incurred when a gun is within sight and reach of a curious 4-year-old.

This story was originally published May 11, 2014 at 12:00 AM with the headline "KCI, heavy rains, improving U.S.."