The Editor,
Re. "Papers must pay" (Letters, The Tri-City News, April 4).
The above-referenced submission is an incomplete headline and letter. The letter writer almost captured the process involved but fell short at the end.
After his interesting and detailed weighing of the newsprint products, the writer, Bruce Cutayne, also outlined accurately that the MMBC proposal "will push part of this cost back onto the newspapers" and, therefore, "to stay economically viable, newspapers will have to push this cost upstream onto advertisers."
But Mr. Cutayne then concluded his analysis with the assumption that the process stopped right there, with the advertisers absorbing any increase in responsibility and costs. That is obviously an incorrect assumption because the same reasoning must be applied to the advertisers/merchants, which also must "stay economically viable."
Depending on the definition for viability, which inevitably includes the aspect of profitability, it is most likely that the advertisers would have to push their costs upstream to - guess where - the consumers of their products. Who else would pay for the products and the advertising unless the advertisers/merchants pay for it from their after-taxes private bank accounts? Not likely.
No, the consumer (often referred to as the taxpayer - i.e., all of us), and rightly so, would be the payer as usual. It is always on the backs of the taxpayers, there is no avoiding that fact.
Thus, it comes full circle and the article and title are completed with: "Consumers must pay." It's the circle of life.
Farrell Hannah, Coquitlam
