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Munoz: No to Keystone XL and unwarranted slur (letter)

Cesar Munoz
Dillon Valley

Re. Lorenzo Del Toro’s letter to the editor, Feb. 19:

Despite Mr. Del Toro’s ability to calculate figures into the billions, in reality he has added 2 + 2 and gotten 5, a simple but not surprising error considering he was probably “seeing red” (maybe brown) and could not think straight.

Before I address the most despicable aspect of his letter, I recommend “Tax Credits for Illegal Immigrants” at FactCheck.org; it’s a good history of the policy that did not begin with President Obama. In the context of Obama’s now-halted executive order and Mr. Del Toro’s concern, even IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said he had “no idea how much the tax credit might cost and that’s because no one truly knows how many illegal immigrants might apply for it.” Now no one can apply, thanks to Judge Hanen, who long before making his decision had said Obama’s immigration policy was “an open invitation to the most dangerous criminals in society.”



Now, let me, like Mr. Del Toro, also connect this to the Keystone XL pipeline by saying “no we shouldn’t” subsidize highly profitable industries such as oil and gas with $37.5 billion annually — that’s the real “handout” to “tax-evaders”! According to Taxpayers for Common Sense: “The 2008-2012 average tax that the three largest U.S. based oil and gas companies paid to the U.S. Treasury was actually 20 percent, which is 15 percent lower than the corporate rate of 35 percent.” Imperatively, we need to shift away from fossil fuels.

Yet more revealing than Mr. Del Toro’s numbers were his words. Perhaps too sophisticated to use “wetback” or “fence-jumper,” he pens a new slur, “tax-evader,” and not only paints all 5 million potential Obama deferrals with this epithet, but paints them all brown — that is, “from South-of-the-Border.” Such inflammatory rhetoric besides its inaccuracy is a prompt to create a lynch-mob mentality against yet another vulnerable minority in U.S. history.



Cesar Munoz

Dillon Valley


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