A pox on your tax

Re “Why you want this tax hike,” Opinion, July 24

The title of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s article implies that perhaps there were other tax hikes from him that we didn’t want. He’s got that right. Since he has been mayor, I have seen garbage fees triple, ostensibly to pay for more police. I have seen him deceive the voters of Los Angeles into approving a 9% tax on their phone service. Still there are not enough police.

Now he wants us to add another 0.5% to the sales tax so that we can pay for an impossibly huge transportation makeover? How long will it be before he is asking us for even more taxes when he finds out that cost estimates were too optimistic? This man’s pie-in-the-sky visions are out of touch with reality. The people of Los Angeles are already struggling with an economic downturn, and the last thing they need are more taxes to fund services they may never get to use.

David Etheridge

Los Angeles

Villaraigosa’s arguments for a tax hike are all well and good until I think of the article you ran July 20, “Firm boasts about ‘mining’ tax dollars to make big profits.”

It seems Villaraigosa gives millions of our tax dollars to a bunch of people who not only use the city as a way of enriching themselves but who brag about it as well and even put the mayor’s photograph in their sales packet.

No thank you, Mayor. I don’t want my tax dollars subsidizing developers.

Martha Stevens

Studio City