22 THE COURIER SUN • JULY 30, 2015 FOR BREAKING NEWS VISIT www.couriersun.com editorial sun WWW.COURIERSUN.COM VICTORIA SCHNEPS-YUNIS JOSHUA A. SCHNEPS BOB BRENNAN ROBERT POZARYCKI AMY AMATO-SANCHEZ NIRMAL SINGH GRAZIELLA ZERILLI STEPHEN REINA RON TORINA, JENNIFER DECIO, CHERYL GALLAGHER CRISTABELLE TUMOLA, ANGY ALTAMIRANO, KATRINA MEDOFF ANTHONY GIUDICE, ANGELA MATUA, ALINA SURIEL CLIFF KASDEN, SAMANTHA SOHMER, ELIZABETH ALONI CRISTABELLE TUMOLA DEMETRA PLAGAKIS WARREN SUSSMAN CELESTE ALAMIN MARIA VALENCIA VICTORIA SCHNEPS-YUNIS JOSHUA A. SCHNEPS PUBLISHER & EDITOR CO-PUBLISHER ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER EDITOR-IN-CHIEF VP, EVENTS, WEB & SOCIAL MEDIA ART DIRECTOR ASSISTANT TO PUBLISHER ASSISTANT ART DIRECTOR ARTISTS STAFF REPORTERS CONTRIBUTING REPORTERS WEB EDITOR EVENTS MANAGER SENIOR ACCOUNT EXECUTIVE CLASSIFIED MANAGER CONTROLLER PRESIDENT & CEO VICE PRESIDENT Schneps Communications, 38-15 Bell Blvd., Bayside, NY 11361 718-224-5863 • Fax 718-224-5441 Sales Fax: 718-631-3498 www.couriersun.com editorial e-mail: editorial@queenscourier.com for advertising e-mail: ads@queenscourier.com Entire Contents Copyright 2015 by The Courier Sun All letters sent to THE COURIER SUN should be brief and are subject to condensing. Writers should include a full address and home and offi ce telephone numbers, where available, as well as affi liation, indicating special interest. Anonymous letters are not printed. Name withheld on request. No such ad or any part thereof may be reproduced without prior permission of THE COURIER SUN. The publishers will not be responsible for any error in advertising beyond the cost of the space occupied by the error. Errors must be reported to THE COURIER SUN within fi ve days of publication. Ad position cannot be guaranteed unless paid prior to publication. VIctoria Media Services assumes no liability for the content or reply to any ads. The advertiser assumes all liability for the content of and all replies. The advertiser agrees to hold THE COURIER SUN and its employees harmless from all cost, expenses, liabilities, and damages resulting from or caused by the publication or recording placed by the advertiser or any reply to any such advertisement. “Do you think the voting age should be “No, at 16 you don’t know much about politics yet at that age.” Britni Mignon BY BROOKE RUTMAN “What exactly do kids know these days? However, yes I do think it should be lowered. There would be more voters.” Chris Wells “Yeah, so I can vote! I’m 16. It’d be nice to vote.” Erin Yu “Yeah, I do think the voting age should be lowered.” John Paige “Sure, it would get more younger people involved.” Valentino Russo “No, there are still places in our country that need a better education.” Valentina Cano street talk “No, 18 is still a very young age.” Ella Jeong “No, at 16 you’re not at the emotional and political maturity level to deal with those issues.” Sam Martinelli lowered from 18 to 16?” SNAPS QUEENS Panorama of the City of New York at the Queens Museum. PHOTO BY THE QUEENS COURIER STAFF Send us your photos of Queens and you could see them online or in our paper! Submit them to us via our Instagram @queenscourier, Facebook page, tweeting @queenscourier or by emailing editorial@queenscourier.com (subject: Queens Snaps). LGA project should spark a ‘new deal’ Somewhere Fiorello LaGuardia must be smiling. The airport named for the great New York City mayor, who fl ew into and out of it countless times during his tenure, is fi nally set to receive a much-needed $4 billion makeover that Governor Andrew Cuomo and Vice President Joe Biden announced on July 27. Our readers may recall Biden’s statement last year in which he compared arriving at LaGuardia to arriving in a third-world nation. It was an off-thecuff, if not honest, indictment not just of LaGuardia’s deterioration as a gateway to the city, but also of the general decline of the city’s infrastructure. Here, at long last, is a bold plan for a 21st-century LaGuardia complete with new terminals closer to the Grand Central Parkway and an AirTrain linking up to the 7 line and the Long Island Rail Road at Willets Point. It will take years, it will cost a fortune, but New York needs to do this — and it needs the fi nancial support from all levels of government to get the job done. Taking offi ce at the height of the Great Depression, LaGuardia and his then-ally, master builder Robert Moses, worked tirelessly on New Deal projects that modernized New York City. It helped that LaGuardia had a friend in President Franklin D. Roosevelt, New York’s former governor, whom he frequently visited to bring additional funds to the city. The city shouldn’t need another depression to get the support it needs to modernize. May this project being the start of a “new deal” of sorts with D.C., a partnership to fi nally invest in the city’s roads, power grids, train lines and other structures and ease the burdens for city residents and businesses. Solving wage inequality with inequality Whether you’re for or against a higher minimum wage, there’s something rather troubling about the way the New York State government is going about raising the salary standard. A special board recommended last week that the state Labor Department gradually increase the minimum wage to $15 per hour by 2021 — but to expedite that increase for those in the fast food industry, bringing them up to the $15 rate by 2018. It seems rather disingenuous to raise the wages of an isolated group of non-union workers ahead of the entire workforce. If the goal of boosting the minimum wage is to help address the stark problems associated with income inequality, why then is the state committed to implementing the new mandate unequally? We also need to realize that not every business that employs low-wage workers is a corporate conglomerate worth billions. Small businesses will bear the burden of higher wages, which will undoubtedly drive up their bottom line. Implementing the wage increase over six years should soften that blow, but in three years, they’ll risk losing workers if they can’t offer a wage competitive with the higher minimum wage for fast-food workers. The narrative has been that low-wage workers, from fast-food workers to grocery clerks and every other job in between, all require a raise. The policy under consideration, however, reeks of solving inequality for one group by preserving inequality for another.
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