News & Articles

Letter to a climate change-denying congressman

Dear Congressman Tiffany,
I recently read in a column by Bruce Murphy in the online publication Urban Milwaukee that in an interview with him regarding smoke from Canadian wildfires, you indicated that you don’t believe that man-made climate change has been proven, calling it a “theory that needs to be tested…To me the jury is still out there.” 

If the jury is still out there, there is obviously a risk that it could return a verdict that the vast majority of climate scientists are right: that unless we act now to greatly reduce carbon emissions, we are, in effect, sentencing our children, grandchildren, and all of their descendants to life on a severely degraded planet.

In your judgment, is this an acceptable risk that we should simply ignore, or should we act to reduce it with policies to reduce our carbon emissions? I expect that many of us in the 7th Congressional District would appreciate learning your view on this concern in an upcoming edition of the Tiffany Telegram.

Sincerely,
Bill Bussey
Bayfield, Wisconsin

The Reverse

The great wild left to those who can afford it,
Those whose big houses took over the woods,
Whose flights to distant paradises wrought
Heightened temperatures and increased odds
Of collapse. All of the well-to-do
Nature lovers consuming at a high pitch
The luxury trips, the whale-watching cruise,
Saddened at ruin happening on their watch
But whose oversized trucks fill the highways
And whose children expect even more.
What poor person is doing so much to cause 
Such harm to the earth and to the air?
The homeless, enduring blame for poverty,
Left to the blazing heat, concrete, no pity.
Jane Whitledge
Duluth, Minnesota

Stauber gets it wrong again

Representative Stauber was given an opportunity to defend his vote for the reconciliation bill in the August 1, 2025 opinion page of the Duluth News Tribune. I read with interest but was immediately disappointed in his lack of transparency and clarity. He disputed a statement from the St. Louis County officials even though they were correct that the bill would shift Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) costs from the federal government to our state. If not funded by the county, this will take food assistance from needy children and elderly. Representative Stauber justifies this with the claim that states hit with this decrease have not reduced their “error rate” in payments to less than 6% by 2027. He then bemoans the error rates of far-flung states ending with the comparison of the Minnesota error of 9% with Wisconsin’s lower rate of 4.47%. On this opening point, he fails to help voters understand what the bill means by “error rate.” This is not the rate of overpayment. This is a combined error of overpayments and underpayments. So in the case of Minnesota, we have overpayment of 6.32% and under payments of 2.66%. So total errors are in the range of 9%, but this has nothing to do with saving 9% in this budget item. Minnesota may have an overpayment of 3.5%, but it has been established that many of these errors are paperwork glitches like missing data that if provided might take it off the error list. He then moves on to the work requirements for Medicaid and SNAP, and he states 72% of able bodied adults on the program choose not to work. Where that number came from is unclear. I would point readers to KFF health policy organization, whose board chair is Olympia Snowe (a long time Republican senator from Maine) and KFF notes in their comprehensive study that most able bodied recipients of SNAP and Medicaid are working with only 8% reporting “that they are retired, unable to find work, or were not working for another reason.” So this legislation will not bring us into any “golden age”, but rather punish and leave the poor behind, stress out County funds, enrich the very wealthy, and put the burden of trillions of debt on our children and grandchildren.

Reference for the KFF analysis:
kff.org/medicaid/issue-brief/understanding-the-intersection-of-medicaid-and-work-an-update/?utm_campaign=KFF-Medicaid&utm_medium=email&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-8xeFXagaeiNYMT6yBqfJq18HuMr8zulQ2XxNdMR1EoNT1zkOi7azKHsjyfSgClWxER1zRGiPsW-gGc80fzvGUijJANMg&_hsmi=345705566&utm_content=345705566&utm_source=hs_email
SNAP error rate by state:
fns-prod.azureedge.us/sites/default/files/resource-files/snap-fy24QC-PER.pdf
Lynn Johansen
Duluth, Minnesota