Minimum wage laws and higher prices

To the editor:

In his recent letter, "Cold thinking," Charles Parrish writes about the minimum wage and how it affects employment. I couldn't help but disagree with his opinion.

Mr. Parrish said that reasonable people wouldn't notice the small amount of money added to each item to cover the cost of wages for those employees earning minimum wage. Of course, in this economy, most everyone is watching their pennies, but the real problem is this:

Every time wages go up, whether it's because of a raise in the minimum wage or whatever, prices generally do, too. So it's really just a continuing cycle of wages and prices continually increasing with little or no benefit to wage earners, as buying power is the most important thing to consider.

What good does it do to give someone a raise and then take it away because of the increase in the cost of goods they have to buy?

All one has to do is to see how, in the past 50 years or so, inflation has run rampant compared to the previous 50 years. When I was a child, a typical house cost about $6,000. We all saw what happened when the housing market out-priced itself from the typical home buyer. What's going to happen when the food industry out-prices itself due to the high cost of labor? Civil war?

Jack Oliver

Las Vegas

Bad ideas

To the editor:

Clark County School Board President Carolyn Edwards called the governor's budget "misguided" and said, "I think we elected the wrong governor." That may be so. Time will tell.

But it is certain that we have elected the wrong members of the School Board. The board oversees a district that has wasted millions, taught students to feel good about themselves instead of how to read, rubber-stamped union demands and blamed taxpayers for its own failures.

It is your leftist, New Age ideas that are "misguided."

D. Christenson

Boulder City

Numbers game

To the editor:

If ever headlines and pictures lent credentials to the phrase "hindsight is 20/20," Friday's newspaper sure did. On the front page, we had a story about cuts to our education system, while on the front of the Nevada section a story told how locals are heading to California to buy lottery tickets in hopes of winning the Mega Millions.

The casino moguls continue to argue that a lottery will take away from their profits and that the Megabucks machines are a decent replacement. That argument doesn't hold water. The profits from the Megabucks machines do not go directly to the school district but instead to the casinos and IGT.

Casino operators and some politicians claim that lotteries in most states do not do what they were intended to do when it comes to funding schools, mostly because of fund raiding or bad management.

But on the other hand, there are states that have overcome this and do not have these problems.

Furthermore, we can solve the mismanagement problems by not installing the lottery machines in any casino.

Joe Schaerer

Las Vegas