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Funding long-term care at critical stage |
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Funding long-term-care providers and facilities is in a critical stage at the Minnesota Legislature this session.
The highly regulated long-term care center industry (once known as
nursing homes) needs more state funding just to stay close to even in
providing care to the ever-growing number of aging residents.
Demographers are predicting that by the year 2020, Minnesota will have
more senior residents than school children.
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Read more...
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Keeping the legal drinking age at 21 |
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By Don Heinzman
ECM Editorial Contributor
There are bills in the Minnesota Legislature to lower the drinking age to 18.
As Minnesota wrestles with the problem of teen drunken driving deaths,
binge drinking and an increase in high school student drinking, it
makes little sense to make legal drinking easier and earlier.
Throughout the country, states are taking a second look at lowering the
age, figuring if United States military volunteers can fight and die at
18, they ought to be able to have a drink in a bar.
In South Dakota, a petition is around that would allow 19 and
20-year-olds to buy beer no stronger than 3.2 percent alcohol. In
Wisconsin, an effort is under way that would allow active duty military
personnel younger than 21 to buy alcohol.
It is clear, however, that a national effort would be opposed by American parents and major lobbying groups.
No ground swell exists in Minnesota for lowering the legal drinking
age. Under a federal law, Minnesota could lose 10 percent of its
federal highway money if the age were lowered.
Since 1984, the bar for drinking legally has been raised to 21 years
and there’s evidence that raising the age has saved lives on the
highways.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that
minimum-drinking laws have saved 18,220 lives, 861 in 1998
alone.
The same report says that increasing the age has produced a 13 percent decrease in traffic accidents.
Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MAAD) oppose lowering the drinking age
saying that highway drunken driving fatalities have declined
precipitously since the drinking age was raised. MAAD also says
that after 29 states lowered the drinking age in the 1970s, all of them
saw drunken driving highway deaths spike.
Another argument against lowering the drinking age is that 18-year-olds
are not as responsible as 21-year-olds when drinking and particularly
driving. Younger drivers tend to believe that they are
invincible, that they can hold their liquor and they are ignorant of
how much drinking can impair their judgment while driving.
Teenage boys with a blood alcohol level of .05 to .10 are 18
times more likely to suffer a single vehicle crash, and teenage girls
at the same levels are 54 more times likely to have a crash.
Still, advocates of lowering the drinking age contend if servicemen and
women can fight in Iraq and Afghanistan they should be able to drink at
18 years of age. A group called Missouri 18 to Drink, said as of
the start of this year, 650 who have died in the war were under the age
of 21.
Evidence is on the side of keeping the legal drinking age at 21, the
age where drinking liquor can be done more responsibly and safely.
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Six Republican legislators should be thanked |
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The Minnesota Republican Party is disciplining Republican legislators
for daring to vote their conscience and for what they believe is best
for their districts.
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Read more...
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Property tax relief is a must for 2008 session |
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Any property owner in Minnesota will tell you their property taxes have
gone up over the past few years. A recent study in Minnesota says
property taxes across the state have risen 70 percent since 2002.
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Read more...
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A crisis in our court system |
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Editor’s note: The following appeared as a letter to the editor in
the March 8 Winona Daily News. One of our loyal readers told us of
it. She felt it was well-written, and quite thought-provoking,
and we agree!
By Dennis Challeen,
retired judge / Winona
There is a crisis in our court system. It’s been coming for the past
century and will get worse unless lawmakers have the wisdom to change
the system.
We have a criminal justice system designed by normal responsible people
that usually works on normal responsible people (who self-correct) but
fails on the addicted and the irresponsible (who don’t know how to
self-correct).
Let me explain.
Recent newspaper articles report how 14,091 Minnesota motorists are
driving without valid licenses; that one in eight has a DWI on record
and that most offenders that go to jail or prison return to commit more
crimes. The official response by the normal responsible people who make
the laws is to increase fines or mandate more jail time. Simply said:
Get tough, increase the penalties. Sooner or later, they’ll get the
message and become law abiding.
It doesn’t work, and we now know why.
In any society there are people who are irresponsible. We never seem to
understand if a person never learned how to be responsible or to
control childish emotional impulses, punishment by itself doesn’t solve
the problem. We cannot force them to return to being responsible when
they never understood responsibility in the first place, so they endure
the pain and continue to resume the same irresponsible life as they
know it.
Unless we begin to understand the erroneous belief systems of chronic
offenders (“It’s an unfair world,” “Everyone lies, cheats and steals,”
“Some people luck out — some don’t,” “My life would be fine if the cops
just left me alone”), we are doomed to repeat the same worn-out
liberal/conservative correction theories over and over again.
We must lock up and isolate the dangerous offenders we fear — not to
change them but to protect us. But for the vast majority of chronic
offenders that irritate, annoy and anger us, we must teach
responsibility, re-educate, civilize, change their erroneous beliefs
and show them a road map to normal behavior they never learned in their
childhood — behavior most law-abiding citizens fortunately learned on
the way to adulthood.
Judges don’t change people, people must change themselves.
Corrections in the 21st century must point the way to responsibility,
not be part of the problem. The science is available, we must use it.
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We encourage 'letters to the editor'... within reason |
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We here at The Argus value reader input on this very page. We
believe it is part of what helps make a community newspaper of value to
the communities it serves.
That being said, we will no longer be running Letters to the Editor
which exceed the 500 word limit. We also will not run letters to the
editor which promote unsubstantiated claims against an opinion or party.
Given the turn-over in our editorial staff over the past year, we
felt it was time to clearly state our policy. We reserve the right to
deny any letter on the basis of our judgement. Of course, the word
limit is a simple measure. However, letters which offend other readers
with slanderous or unsubstantiated or sometimes false information, will
also not be printed. We believe this is our responsibility to all of
our readers.
We also reserve the right to deny a letter to the editor based on the
number of submissions on a given subject. While we feel it is important
to have every viewpoint expressed, we do not view the Commentary page
as a place to continually rehash a point and beat it to death.
Once a point has been made, our readers have expressed to us in
conversation that we not continue to allow that point to be made over,
and over and over and over at the expense of other opinions.
We intend to honor their wishes in this regard.
While we do not intend to limit the number of times a letter can be
submitted by one person, we will give priority to those voices who are
not heard on a regular basis.
The opinions expressed in a letter to the editor do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this editorial staff.
We appreciate being the medium by which opinions are and can be
expressed. However, we have a responsibility to all parties involved to
do so in a fair and balanced manner.
-Daniel McGonigle
-Charlie Warner
You can contact Daniel McGonigle at
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You can contact Charlie Warner at
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