Editor:

Per Dick Yarbrough, Brian Kemp is either destined for man-of-the-year, or Marvel superhero status. Facts indicate he’s a little premature on both.

1. He lauds the fact that Kemp’s approach to COVID was a gutsy move because we didn’t become the #1 state for COVID deaths. It’s a governor’s duty to take great caution with the lives of his constituents. Instead, he chose to ignore top experts in this field and delayed taking the standard measures to minimize the spread of this disease. What a great bragging point; We weren’t the worst!

2. Running a tight ship to produce a $5B surplus. In Dick’s eyes, this was all due to Kemp’s brilliant fiscal leadership. If Georgia was the only state to start running large surpluses, there might be some merit to this claim. The fact that most states saw huge budget surpluses says otherwise. You’ll recall the COVID stimulus programs, three trillion here, another 2.1 trillion there, and several smaller ones that pumped around $100B into the state. This allowed Georgia, and virtually all other states, to live on federal dollars for a few years and put their own tax revenue in the bank.

3. Hub of the electric transportation industry. Georgia has indeed done well getting those industries to settle here, but it ignores the reason they are building these plants in the first place. Democrats pushed through several programs to bring key industries back to the USA.

Once passed into law, nearly 30 installations like Hyundai’s started popping up all over. The CHIPS act already has six computer chip megaplants in the books. These incentives have accounted for 380,000 jobs in Georgia. Kemp gets credit for bringing them to Georgia, but Democrats deserve credit for creating them.

Ken Copi, Pembroke