Letters: Scandal-plagued insurance commissioner must resign

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Scandal-plagued Lara
should resign now

California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara should resign immediately.

Lara has certainly done his part in contributing to the real and genuine California home insurance crisis. Under his careless watch, many home insurance companies have left the California marketplace altogether.

He has bilked hard-working California taxpayers by taking 46 cross-country and international trips since 2019 while missing several important Senate Insurance Committee meetings.

Moreover, the California Attorney General’s Office should investigate his unnecessary trips to determine just how much he should reimburse the state of California.

Jim Melin
San Jose

Support bill ensuring
prenatal vitamin safety

As obstetricians, our job is to support healthy families. We recommend taking prenatal vitamins before, during and after a pregnancy.

Patients take them in good faith, assuming benefit to their pregnancy. However, 50% of prenatal vitamins contain heavy metals, such as lead and arsenic. These metals can impact the health of moms and babies. We recommend that pregnant people avoid high metal-containing foods like tuna, but their prenatal vitamin may expose them to these metals in potentially harmful amounts.

SB 646 would enforce testing and reporting on the levels of these metals. The bill prohibits sales from manufacturers that exceed safe limits and do not comply with these reporting standards.

California has long led the way in advancing public health protections; supporting SB 646 is an important way to protect our community.

Drs. Amythis Soltani, Simran Kaur and Andrea Henkel
Stanford University
Palo Alto

Trump’s tariffs aim to
fund tax breaks for rich

Concerning Donald Trump’ tariffs, the tariff (tax) is paid to U.S. government by importers (usually corporations). The corporations maintain their profit margin by passing this cost on to consumers (you and me) via price increases. If these tariffs are ever reduced, do you expect prices to be decreased? I don’t think so.

The tariffs collected will go to the income side of the government’s budget. This income will be used to offset the tax reduction for millionaires and billionaires.

Don’t let Trump fool you with his statements concerning an increase in U.S. manufacturing. Those improvements, if any, will take years to occur.

These tariffs are only a means to tax citizens to pay for tax reductions for the rich. You can obtain the same with a value-added tax, but that is political suicide.

Wake up, America.

Robert Steinberg
Sunnyvale

Time has come to
tax political donations

Elon Musk contributes hundreds of millions of dollars to national and state elections and offers incentives to buy votes for his candidate. Sounds like waste and corruption to me. Unlimited contributions give the wealthy more free speech than the average voter. Musk boasting about his contributions goes to another level — giving his support more media exposure and greater influence over candidates.

Public financing is unlikely to be enacted, so something else must be considered to mute the influence of the wealthy on elections.

We should tax political contributions. In 2024, campaigns gathered $8.6 billion by April. A 10% tax on contributions would bring in about $860 million — money that could be set aside to actually do something constructive. And that’s before the election. Such a tax would also level the disproportionate influence the wealthy have on elections and candidates.

David Riggs
Aptos

Trump, Netanyahu in
race to the bottom

Re: “‘Administrative error’ sends Maryland man to El Salvador prison” (Page A4, April 2).

With zero due process, the Trump administration sent a group of men to a notorious El Salvador prison, apparently because our Guantanamo Bay prison was not horrendous enough. These men may never return, they have no legal recourse, and the conditions are worse than abysmal.

I thought it was the most despicable act imaginable until I read another article on the same page about the 15 medics in Gaza who were killed in cold blood and plowed over by Israeli military bulldozers. You don’t have to be an expert in Middle East affairs to easily recognize that the Israeli Defense Force engages in crimes against humanity.

The wanton cruelty and blatant lack of any human decency make me wonder whether Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu are vying to determine who is the worst person in the world.

Jerry Gudeman
Santa Clara