Stress-free elections, Chiefs fandom and the minimum wage

Big voting help

The League of Women Voters wants registered voters to know that advance planning will yield a stress-free voting experience Tuesday.

Plan to show your Missouri driver’s license or non-driver card, U.S. passport or military ID, or one of these with your current address on it: voter notification card, utility bill, bank statement, paycheck, government check, Missouri post-secondary school ID or government document.

Photo ID is not required for this election. If you don’t have ID with you, vote a provisional ballot.

Prepare to mark your ballot by going to our nonpartisan www.vote411.org. It has information to help with decision-making. Enter your address and see only candidates and issues you will vote on and candidate responses to nonpartisan questions.

Vote411.org will show your poll site location and a link on how to vote absentee if at the last minute you discover you’ll be out of town or have another reason you can’t go to the polls.

Have a condition preventing you from waiting in line or walking into the poll site? Request curbside voting from poll workers. It’s your right.

Voting need not be stressful. A little planning goes a long way.

Evelyn Maddox

Rosemary Durkin

Co-Presidents, League of

Women Voters of Kansas

City/Jackson/Clay/Platte

Counties

Kansas City

Chiefs fans’ wish

Close your eyes a moment and picture this: It’s October and you’re in Denver. You’re walking down the sidewalk and a red sports car zips by on the street next to you. You take note of the familiar KC-inside-an-arrowhead sticker in a corner of the rear window. Then you smile as you read “CHIEFS”on the Colorado personalized license plate.

Up ahead is a bar; it’s lunchtime. You step through the door. At the first table is a 20ish man wearing a Super Bowl hat that reads “Kansas City Chiefs Champions.”

You take a seat in a booth by the wall. The waitress comes over and greets you wearing a “Mahomes 15” jersey. “Go Chiefs,” you say. “Broncos suck,” comes her reply.

Now open your eyes and think about this: No matter how long it takes for a scene like that to become reality, that’s how long Chiefs fans need Patrick Mahomes as their quarterback.

Terry Phillips

Lee’s Summit

Not their job

In its support of Missouri Proposition B, which would raise the minimum wage to $12 an hour by 2023, The Star’s editorial board cites census data indicating that minimum-wage increases do not cost jobs or increase unemployment. (Oct. 25, 10A, “Vote yes on Proposition B in Missouri”) Free-market-defending economists Milton Friedman, Henry Hazlitt, Thomas Sowell, Walter E. Williams and many others disagree.

Regardless, what gives federal or state governments the right to tell private employers what to pay employees, or even to put forth a vote on it?

Having said all this, the current roaring U.S. economy, largely brought about by the tax cuts and reduction of regulations from President Donald Trump and the Republicans, is showing the actual way to raise pay. There are about 7 million job openings in the U.S. (a record) — about a million more than the number of unemployed.

As happened in the tax-cutting 1980s, this is causing employers to compete for good employees by offering more pay and other perks.

A strong economy is the actual way to raise pay up and down the income ladder, not a limited, state-imposed wage.

Mark S. Robertson

Independence