To the Editor:
If you, citizens of Cape May County, love your home and genuinely want the best for it, you must vote selfishly. You must vote in a manner with our county’s best interest at heart.
Do not look at the election like you would a football game. Do not back a candidate because “that’s always been your team.” Your team is Cape May County.
How does team Cape May County exist? It is a tourist-based community. People visit us for our beaches and our beautiful towns. Anyone who would seek to take that from us is our enemy.
Cape May is also kept afloat by the many people who retire here, bringing additional year-round jobs. Health care, retail, and accommodations are our primary job sources.
Located on our peaceful peninsula, we are too far away from any ports or transportation hubs to draw industry, we don’t have the population to support becoming a tech hub, and as the oceans continue to warm, more and more fishing is gone further north.
Sadly, the possibility of oil drilling off our shores and the shores of our neighboring states has become a frightening reality. Southern states have a temporary two-year moratorium on drilling, but there is nothing to stop it north of South Carolina.
If oil is discovered and drilling takes place, we are not situated in an area where we would benefit economically from this. We would only suffer from the marred views and inevitable oil spills.
Yes, this happens rather frequently. The spills are not always massive, but according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), there were 137 oil spills in the U.S. alone, in 2018, and the odds of this happening are even greater on the East Coast, as these would be the first experimental drills in an area that has not been regularly drilled before.
Our other biggest source of revenue is also under attack. Retirees of all walks of life depend on Social Security in some form. It is often their primary source of income and even when it is not, it is usually the only secure source, as pensions have become rare or collapse and 401Ks (if you are lucky enough to have one) are subject to the constant fluctuations of the markets.
The payroll tax that covers 90% of Social Security funding has been deferred with promises to make the deferment permanent. The plan to cover the lost revenue by printing more money from the general fund is the first step to dismantling it.
Only Congress can eliminate Social Security, but it is being set up to fail. Congress also would have to approve up to an additional $1 trillion a year as Social Security stands to pay for it that way.
Budgets are barely passed without getting down to the wire. Would you want your primary source of revenue to be up to Congress?
Either one of these events will severely cripple Cape May County, but together they will kill it. We need our representatives to pledge “undying support” to our interests, not to outsiders who seek to destroy us.
Before you vote this election, don’t vote for any political party’s team, vote for the home team. Vote to keep Cape May County alive.
