Your "Heavy Burden" (August 19) was a great article, and the accompanying graphic ("Beantown Counters") was neat. The property-tax burden in Boston is indeed getting far too heavy. Legislators need to pay attention to your message, rethink the whole range of the tax structure, make some courageous decisions, and actually do something about it. One alarming statistic you cite is that "more than 50 percent of property in the city of Boston . . . is tax exempt." And we know tax-exempt entities are expanding. They are a positive factor in the community, to be sure, but residents and businesses can't keep paying their share of city/state services. If they can't or won't pay substantially more of their share, they collectively should be limited to a fixed percentage of the tax base — maybe 50 percent.
DON CARLSON
BOSTON
Related:
More muzzles, ''Holy war'' holes, Mail dump, More 
- More muzzles
I question whether "soft censorship" is actually a form of literal censorship.
- ''Holy war'' holes
I’m as liberal as the next guy, and I’ve been bothered for years by the distorted values and activities of the religious right in their pursuit of enforced conformity.
- Mail dump
Thanks for your article on the price increase on blue bags. The article should also mention another consequence of the price hike: some neighbors have chosen to simply ignore the blue-bag rule and use their own bags.
- Dump at City Hall?
Thank you for your recent article about the price increase on city trash bags. When I first noticed this at Hannaford this summer, I was disgusted!
- Infinite Jester
Everything about your article, "Does this book make me look smart?" (April 15), is awful.
- Jazz isn't dead
Regarding your report on the end of jazz programming at WGBH ("Gone, gone, gone," Arts and Entertainment, July 13), jazz isn't dead.
- A jolly good biomass mess
This is corporate pork on steroids, for energy we don't even need.
- Coakley's true grit
Three recent developments suggest that the worm is turning and that the criminal behavior of the nation's huge money-center banks might finally suffer something approaching real justice.
- Bad as me
I'm an economist in much the same sense that I'm commissioner of the National Football League.
- Preaching to the choir
Despite the curious omission of the Phoenix, that bastion of liberal, progressive, alternative news, The Nation's Guide to the Nation (Vintage) mostly lives up to its stated goal of being " a kind of collage of the Left.
- Letters to the Portland Editor: July 10, 2009
A recent EqualityMaine campaign letter claimed that gay marriage is "the fight for our lives." I wonder whose lives they are talking about, when AIDS service organizations and community health/reproductive clinics across the state have been tightening their belts and desperately trying to crunch numbers.
- Less
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