To the Editor:

Town of Colton residents must have been puzzled after reading the article “State Tax Cap Tough on St. Lawrence County School Districts” which appeared in the Sept. 16-22 edition of North Country This Week. After all, there is no tax cap in Colton. School taxes this year have gone up over 200 percent for many homeowners.

“I don’t see any school being in great shape,” BOCES District Superintendent Thomas Burns is quoted as saying. It's certainly true that Colton-Pierrepont Central School, with a student-teacher ratio of 9:1, is not in great shape if compared with most of the private schools in Manhattan.

The Dalton School, for example, with a tuition fee of $43,000, has a student-teacher ratio of 5:1. If the expenditure-per-student were raised at Colton-Pierrepont, it would be possible for the school to match the student-teacher ratio of Dalton.

There will likely be a windfall coming into local coffers in a few years' time, when Colton homeowners unable to pay the higher taxes, especially the elderly living on social security, will be expropriated: their homes will be sold at auction, the proceeds of which can be used to increase expenditure-per-student. Those with nowhere else to go will be sent to institutions where experts will decide on the level of care they are to receive.

The ethics of such a trade-off has long been defended at the highest governmental levels. Bioethicist Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a former White House advisor who help design the Affordable Care Act, has stated that the “democratic conception of the good suggests services that ensure healthy future generations, ensure development of practical reasoning skills, and ensure full and active participation by citizens in public deliberations – are to be socially guaranteed as basic. Conversely, services provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens are not basic and should not be guaranteed. An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.”

And Bill Gates, in an interview at the Aspen Ideas Festival, asked hyperbolically, “Is spending a million dollars on that last three months of life for that patient...would it be better not to lay off those two teachers and to make that trade off in medical costs? But that's called the death panel and you're not supposed to have that discussion.”

Expropriatory taxation forces elderly homeowners into institutions where a diagnosis of dementia may await them from one of Bill Gates' unmentionable panels.

Kevin Beary

Colton