I’d like to comment on this magnificent new boat ramp just completed in Franklin.

I was disappointed to read several times in your paper that it was built with money which included a lot of federal tax money. Just what part of the U.S. Constitution, which our Congressman and all his fellow representatives raised their right hands and swore to uphold, permits the federal government to take our hard earned pay from us to build a recreational boat ramp in Franklin, or anywhere else for that matter?

Just today, I read in the Daily Press a similar story about how a federal grant has been approved to pay for the construction of covered bus stops in the city of Newport News. If any locality wants or needs such things, why can’t the people of that community work to get their own local representatives to pay for it with their own local tax money?

If that community can’t afford it, then like my family household and our financial situation, they just won’t have it.

Where is it written that every community in America has the right to have every thing they can dream of?

We have strayed so far from the rules of what was the great experiment called America that we don’t even realize it. I hope the people who celebrated the boat ramp are not the same people who complain about paying so much in federal taxes.

Joseph R. Ferguson Jr.

Ivor