Green Bay Press-Gazette from Green Bay, Wisconsin • Page 5

Opinion OUR MISSION The Press-Gazetto strives, as it has since 1 91 5, to be the primary provider of Information in Northeastern Wisconsin, keeping the welfare and development of the Greater Green Bay area at heart. It is our responsibility to provide a forum for free and open expression of diverse opinions while maintaining the public trust necessary to serve our readers, advertisers, employees and stockholders. A-5 Contact Opinion Page Editor Mike Hoeft at (920) 431-8327 or mhoeftgreenbaypressgazette.com Green Bay Press-Gazette Monday, September 15, 2003 In Our View St. ing when former boxing champ Muhammad Ali and Tibetan spiritual leader Dalai Lama teamed up to Don't feel bad. The U.S.

tax code is so difficult to fathom that even IRS employees failed to correctly answer 43 percent of questions in an undercover stamp-price increase for a while. Case of Injustice The sad truth in the case of former Two Rivers man Flammable Rhetoric You can count on Brown County Supervisor Guy Zima to be quotable. But he was over flamed the vitriolic dialogue that keeps the board from getting the public's work done. Lighten up, Guy Postal Profits The Postal Ser dedicate an interdenominational international temple in Blooming- test. Treasury Department investigators posing as confused taxpayers said Steven Avery is that our criminal justice system does make mistakes.

The injus other man convicted in Brown County for a separate sexual assault. Avery's freedom can't ever make up for the years he lost. But the case should serve as a lesson in crime investigations. Give credit to students in the Wisconsin Innocence Project. Cast further blame on the poor reliability of eyewitness identification in police lineups.

Call Them the Ali Lama It seemed an unlikely pair- vice expects to end the fiscal year $4.2 billion.in the black, its first sur ton, Ind. But their common bonds showed clearly in statements supporting religious tolerance, mutual respect and peace. Bad IRS Advice Think you get confused filling out a 1040 tax form? the top when he defended Ken Simons by saying a group of "self-righteous buzzards" was taking advantage of an inexperienced County Board chairman by baiting him on diversity issues. His comments were not only a back-handed compliment, but also further in they also received no service at all in 3 percent of their attempts last year. While the IRS gets the brunt of our loathing, blame Congress for making the tax code so complex.

Congress should simplify it. tice of his wrongful conviction was corrected Thursday when he was freed after 18 years in prison for a rape he didn't commit. New DNA evidence proved his innocence and linked the crime to an- plus since 1999. Cost-cutting and net income will allow it to pay down a substantial amount of debt. Let's hope that means we won't be seeing another People's Forum and Green Bay system in Northeastern Wisconsin and Michigan.

The recent PCB "cleanup" plan by the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Protection Agency will spend $400 million from the paper industry (who dumped the PCBs) to remove contaminated Fox River sediment to 1 part per million PCBs. Unfortunately, their own studies show the true target should be 0.25 ppm PCBs for minimum public health protection and to allow fish- and duck-consumption advisories to be lifted in a reasonable time. This would add roughly $18 million to cleanup costs in the most contaminated 7-mile stretch of the river. Gov. Doyle has surrendered to the paper industry's job blackmail campaign and approved only a partial cleanup that will not protect public health.

It's like spending $400 million for a new highway system, but saving a little money by not installing on-ramps. All that expense, Control spending, lower income taxes BELLEVUE A recent Press-Gazette op-ed pointed to high SAT scores as a reason for increased education spending. As a taxpayer, I feel these results are "about time," after years of having the major portions of property and income taxes going to support the school systems. For the past 20 years, most Americans have labored under a productivity concept; i.e., providing quality goods or services for the same or less money so let the education system follow suit. No more tax increases for education.

The op-ed claimed most university students stay in Wisconsin after graduation an unfounded notion that does not justify taxpayer subsidies. The real winners are college graduates who earn more income wherever they go, and all for $4,500 per year for their education. Corporate taxes were reduced after Kimberly-Clark moved its offices out of state in protest over high corporate taxes. But personal taxes remain the third-highest in the nation and may increase even more with the re-introduction of the estate tax and failure to cap property taxes. Money spent on taxes is money not used for personal needs.

This is part of the equation in attracting new industries to the state. So lower personal income taxes by controlling spend We Americans are proud people and all we want is a job to support our own family not to show the world we are waiting in bread lines. Would they rebuild our cities and give us food if the tables were turned? I don't think so. Gladys Allen Extortionist Packers should be ashamed DE PERE I am writing this letter to express my disgust with the Green Bay Packers organization. I cannot understand how Bob Harlan and John Jones could stand in front of Packers fans at halftime of the Sept.

7 game and thank them for helping to improve Lambeau Field. The only reason the vote narrowly passed was the Packers blackmailed us with the threat of the franchise moving or being dissolved. I also believe the franchise proved its true colors of only being concerned with making money. They charged $15 per person to attend the Rebirth of a Legend event on Saturday, Sept. 6.

This would have cost a family of five $75 without food or drink. I believe the organization should have given season ticket holders or Brown County residents free tickets to the event to celebrate the blatant abuse of tax dollars and shakedown of seat-license fees from hard-working families. I am a lifelong Packers fan who will always cherish my memories of the Packers and Lambeau Field, but I am becoming increasingly disenchanted with the direction the team is taking forgetting its roots as a hometown team for the aspirations of becoming a national organization. Joe Backmann State must change into new economy but public health will still be at serious risk. We'll be 90 percent there, but won't reach the goal for 55 to 100-plus years.

Several generations of children will be poisoned. Thousands of them. Please don't call this a cleanup. Rebecca Katers People in this country line up for food COLEMAN I watched a TV documentary on people in Ohio waiting in lines for commodities. I was shocked, as a lot of people were.

It seems strange'to me, that they can airlift food and build up cities for our enemies, while we have people waiting in line for food. Something is wrong here! ing. Tom F. Walker Fox PCB project won't protect health GREEN BAY Surveys Creates the sorts of good, well-paying jobs people want; Makes sure that the job base provides statewide economic vitality; Ensures a job base that is diverse enough to buffer Wisconsin's economy from downturns in any particular industry or segment of the national or global economy. Challenges to face As Wisconsin shifts to a knowledge-based economy it must deal with three major challenges.

First, we must help the current workforce to transition from the old economy to the new, which means that we must address: Job losses from mergers, increased competition, and other changes that put pressure on individual workers and already-strained government resources. Greater demand for enhanced skills in the workplace and the pressure such demands put on employers and workers who are trying simultaneously to change and meet demands on the job. Pressure to restrain or reduce wage levels resulting from manufacturers relocating to lower-wage settings and consumers demanding lower prices. Second, we must develop and sustain the work force we need to operate success-' fully in the new economy. In the knowledge economy, education and technology have reordered the way the marketplace and the world are organized.

Together they can empower people with bright ideas and make it possible for large corporations to flatten their organizational structure to give more decisions and more control to employees without jeopardizing the overall strategic direction of the company In this environment, businesses and government must be entrepreneurial to succeed. Indeed, as the Wisconsin Technology Council has pointed out: the educational attainment of a worker (has become) a key differentiator in the market for human resources. The higher the educational at-, tainment of the worker, the more knowledge the person could apply to the job, thereby increasing the worker's overall effectiveness. "Higher education, therefore, is an essential ingredient for a. knowledge-based economy because knowledge is the key input to increasing economic productivity (getting more goods and services from existing inputs) and fostering technological innovation (creating new products and services)." Access to jobs Third, we must enhance the work force's accessibility to good jobs.

Some day, technology and education will enable people to work anywhere, at any time, on anything, together or separately. Someday, however, is not today and that presents a challenge for the new Wisconsin economy Wisconsin's economy is geographically concentrated around its historic roots. Some counties, for example, have more agriculture; others have more manufacturing or tourism or high tech. As our population grows, new technologies come on line and the need for a more highly educated and trained workforce increases, Wisconsin will need to address the question of how we link people and jobs without requiring significant relocation. Put simply, if Wisconsin is to improve its overall economy, it must significantly alter the nature of its employment base.

It must address the question of how to do so while maintaining the geographic diversity that our people currently enjoy. Rolf Wegenke is president and chief executive officer of the Wisconsin Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, representing the 20 private institutions of higher education in the state. His column appears as part of the Building the New Wisconsin Economy initiative. Employment base must adapt BYROLFWEGENKE For thousands of years people depended on the land for their economic well-being. In the 19th and 20th centuries, we shifted to a manufacturing economy in which prosperity was driven by what people could make.

Now, we are once again transforming our society, moving toward a knowledge-based economy in which economic viability is dependent on what we know. The magnitude of this change on the economy has huge significance for Wisconsin. Consider, for example, that according to the U.S. Census Bureau, Wisconsin in 2003 ranks 31st among the states in the percentage of population with college degrees. If Wisconsin could bring its degreed population up to the national average and take fuller advantage of the knowledge-based economy, the additional degreed people would add $7 billion a year to Wisconsin's tax base.

Obviously, unemployed college graduates will not solve our problem, which means that our education strategy must be complemented with a job creation strategy that serves college graduates but also: show that roughly 40,000 people eat unsafe amounts of fish and ducks from the PCB-poisoned Fox River La Beouf deserves every acting accolade that comes his way People's Forum Letters ions are the same: La Beouf's cute, hot and funny. Here's mine: La Beouf is a great actor. You can say that about almost any actor these days but La Beouf deserves it the most. On "Even Stevens," he teaches kids wrong from right and also that it is OK sometimes to just act like a kid. And, as he proved in "Tru Confessions," La Beouf knows what he's doing with serious material.

La Beouf is a great actor and deserves every credit he can get. Katy Hebel, 14, is a student at Bay Port High School. Columns by area teens are published Mondays on the Opinion page. Teens are invited to submit pieces on issues of importance to them. For more information or to submit a column, call Kelley Bruss at (920) 431 -8380 or send her an e-mail at kbrussgreenbay pVsgazette.com.

character to life and when it was time to get emotional, he did it just right. Anyone who watches this movie gets teary-eyed at least once. This shows how good an actor he is. Going from funny man to serious is a major difference and must be pretty difficult. From making you laugh hysterically to making you cry tragically, La Beouf is more than you think.

He has appeared on "Touched by an Angel," and more recently, he was in "Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle" and his big break was in this summer's book-to-movie "Holes." And La Beouf is still playing Louis Stevens on "Even Stevens." Being a great actor finally paid off when La Beouf won a 2003 Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Performer in a Children's Series. Among my friends, opin BY KATY HEBEL Most of us know Shia La Beouf as Louis Stevens in The Disney Channel comedy "Even Stevens." This talented 17-year-old comic has made us laugh through the worst times. But although La Beouf is one of the funniest kids alive, he is also a very good serious actor. One of his more serious roles was in the TV movie "Tru Confessions." Shia plays a mentally challenged boy, Eddie Walker. The story is about Eddie's sister, who wants to become a movie star.

She starts to make a movie about Eddie, not knowing what he is really like inside. Tru, Eddie's sister, eventually wins a contest but she also wins something more important a better understanding of her brother. This movie was great. Shia really brought the Letters to the editor, opinion and editorial columns and articles submitted to the Green Bay Press-Gazette may be published or distributed in print, electronic or other forms. THIS WEEK'S FORUM LETTERS: www.greenbaypressgazette.com MAIL TO: People's Forum Press-Gazette, P.O.

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Nusbaum, publisher Carol Hunter, executive editor Barbara Janesh, managing editor Joanne pperer, deputy editor Press-Gazette. All other items cartoons, columns by syndicated and local writers and People's Forum letters reflect the author's opinion..