Three cheers for band/choir

Three cheers for band/choir
EDITOR:
I am a 16-year old sophomore at Jackson-Milton High School. I have been to three different middle schools and one high school. At every one of them, I've noticed the same thing: Sports get more recognition than other extracurricular activities. I am in choir and I have many friends in band, and we think that we deserve better treatment and recognition.
Every day I get up and go to school and work hard in all my classes, but I work extra hard in choir. The band works very hard too. We work just as much and just as hard as all the sports kids do. But yet we don't get a thing for it. The sports kids go work hard and we have assemblies for them; they get money for things they need, and they are well known throughout the school. The choir had to come up with its own money to get a new piano, both the band and choir rooms are falling apart, and we are not well known at all. The people are so rude in my school that when we did have an assembly for the band because it was going to state competition, they left early, and didn't support the band at all.
Most people in my school would disagree with me. They would say that sports are challenging to do and they work more, so they deserve the better things. But it's not true, the band and choir work just as much and it is just as challenging.
I think that the band and choir leaders could help by calling the papers if band/choir go to state. When the band or choir goes somewhere or does something important announce it like they do the sports. The band and choir kids could help by trying to get people to join and making themselves more visible by speaking out more in school about what is going on in band/choir. I would like to see the band and choir get more recognition and better treatment in the schools.
JESSICA ROBINSON
Girard
Looking for compromise
EDITOR:
Proposals to repeal or partially repeal the federal estate tax are due to come before the U.S. Senate this month. Outright repeal would get rid of this source of revenue completely. The partial repeal proposal from Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) would lower the tax rate to 15 percent and raise the exemption level (the portion of the estate which is not taxed) to $5 million. Neither of these options makes sense. This is the fairest of taxes, assessed only on the largest estates. We have the largest budget deficit in history. Outright repeal will cost nearly one trillion dollars over ten years, enough to pay for the entire cost of the Iraq war to date.
Only one-third of one percent of all estates are affected by the estate tax. A blanket exemption shields the first $2 million of any estate from taxes. The exemption will rise to $3.5 million by 2009. The proposed repeal has been sold to the public on the grounds that it will help small, family-owned businesses and, as President Bush put it, "keep family farms in the family." However, the Congressional Budget Office found that even with an exemption level of $1.5 million, only 223 family-owned businesses in the entire nation would have owed any estate tax at all. Further, despite the president's claim, the American Farm Bureau Federation recently acknowledged that it could not cite a single example of a farm having to be liquidated due to estate taxes.
The estate tax was enacted during World War I as a way for the federal government to meet its expanding obligations. As we decrease taxes, we make future generations pay the debt caused by the federal government's failure to raise needed revenue.
JON HONECK
Columbus
The writer is a research analyst in the Columbus office of Policy Matters Ohio, a non-profit, non-partisan research institute.