Tax deduction plots

Letters to the Editor

Tax deduction plots

I live in a modest house in Gardenside. My back yard has no grass. It has the city’s 71st rain garden and five rain barrels, which help with our stormwater issues.

It also has 10 blueberry bushes, three fig trees, innumerable strawberry and raspberry plants, eight raised growing beds, beneficial insect and bee-attracting flowers, compost heaps, culinary herbs and an earthworm hotel.

Hmm. It seems to me that I and other “backyard farmers” should qualify for a considerable property tax deduction for turning our suburban plots back into farms. Instead of gleaning extra produce, I would sell a few pints of blueberries and get a sizable deduction. Just saying.

Kathleen Fluhart

Lexington

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Letters to the Editor

Cringe-o-rama: Mitch McConnell, lower standards for nursing home inspections, UK shoe fetish, us. Us?

By Herald-Leader readers

February 15, 2019 04:51 PM

Cringe-worthy McConnell

In opinion pieces in the Herald-Leader and on the floor of the U.S. Senate, Sen. Mitch McConnell has opposed the Democratic Party’s legislation to reform the methods states use for electing members of Congress. He characterizes the bill as an unprecedented power grab by Democrats. He casts himself as a defender of the constitutional rights of state legislatures to prescribe the time, place and manner for holding elections for U.S. senators and members of the House of Representatives. He pledges that he will not let such a bill come before the Senate for a vote (as an aside, how democratic is a system based on procedures that allow one person to block a bill from being considered by the full Senate?).

As a retired University of Kentucky law professor, I cringe that one of our graduates would make an argument that ignores a basic tenet of constitutional interpretation — read the whole sentence/clause. The Constitution, Article I, Section 4, states: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations...”