Month: October 2013

Gov. Brewer’s ‘Arizona Comeback’ is the light of an oncoming train

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

In yet another "I told you so moment," I told you so. 'The Arizona Comeback,' Guv? Not so much:

By the way, that budget surplus Brewer is touting is illusory. The
package of tax cuts enacted for businesses that begin to phase in this
fiscal year will begin to erode that "surplus" quickly, as the tax cuts
were meant to maintain a structural revenue deficit so that
Tea-Publicans can make the argument that we need to cut the state budget
even more.

If the Tea-Publicans in Congress continue to pull money out of the
economy with their "austerity" automatic sequester cuts, or worse, blow
up the economy by defaulting on the federal debt ceiling, the economic
downturn which will result will quickly dissipate Governor Brewer's
illusory budget "surplus."

This week, the Arizona legislatur'e JLBC agreed with me. State
heading into financial hole within next two years:

The state is headed into another financial
hole, the combination of already approved tax cuts and required annual
spending increases.

Members of the state's Finance Advisory Committee predicted Friday that revenues will grow 3.5 percent this current fiscal year over
what they were last year. And the following year there will be another
5.3 percent increase.

But Richard Stavneak, staff director of the Joint Legislative Budget
Committee, said none of that is keeping pace with already built-in
requirements for annual spending. In fact, even the budget for the
current year is $330 million above what's coming in the door.

Stavneak said the state can survive for the next
two fiscal years because of sharp spending cuts in prior years, coupled
with leftover cash from the now-expired 1-cent surcharge on the state
sales tax.

But Staveneak said that will be gone by the 2016
budget year, with the state ending up $202 million in the red. And if
that deficit is not cured and spending proceeds apace, he figures the
red ink could hit $505 million by the 2017 budget year.

Even that may be optimistic.

Especially if the Tea-Publican economic terorists in Congress actually do default on the U.S. debt in a couple of weeks. The 2008 financial crisis is going to look like a Sunday walk in the park compared to the economic catastrophe to be unleashed by a default on the U.S. debt.

Jan Brewer and AZ’s Republicans showing their priorities during the federal government shutdown: tourists and photo ops over poor people

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By Craig McDermott, cross-posted from Random Musings

 

Republicans doing a mean two-step during the shutdown…with the emphasis on "mean"…

Step 1:

From the Associated Press, via KVOA (Tucson) –

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer is taking an offer to use state money to keep the Grand Canyon open to the top.

Brewer
and state legislative leaders sent a letter to President Barack Obama
urging him to approve funding the Arizona park and other national parks.

Step 2:

Colbert King: The modern GOP is the New Confederacy

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

In a follow-up to my post, Republicans on the modern GOP: An anti-government, Neo-Confederate insurrectionist party of radicals, the Washington Post's Colbert King details today, The rise of the New Confederacy (excerpt):

Confederale SoldiersFederal government as the enemy.

Today there is a New
Confederacy, an insurgent political force that has captured the
Republican Party and is taking up where the Old Confederacy left off in
its efforts to bring down the federal government.

No shelling of a
Union fort, no bloody battlefield clashes, no Good Friday assassination
of a hated president — none of that nauseating, horrendous stuff. But
the behavior is, nonetheless, malicious and appalling.

The New
Confederacy, as churlish toward President Obama as the Old Confederacy
was to Lincoln, has accomplished what its predecessor could not: It has shut down the federal government, and without even firing a weapon or taking 620,000 lives, as did the Old Confederacy’s instigated Civil War.

Not
stopping there, however, the New Confederacy aims to destroy the full
faith and credit of the United States, setting off economic calamity at
home and abroad — all in the name of “fiscal sanity.”

Its members
are as extreme as their ideological forebears. It matters not to them,
as it didn’t to the Old Confederacy, whether they ultimately go down in
flames. So what? For the moment, they are getting what they want: a
federal government in the ditch, restrained from seeking to create a
more humane society that extends justice for all.

The ghosts of the Old Confederacy have to be envious.

Thomas Mann on the modern GOP

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

As i posted yesterday, one of the high priests of Beltway centrism, political scientist Norman
Ornstein, has been ringing the warning bell about the radicalism of the
modern Republican Party for a couple of years now as well. Ornstein's
latest warning in The Atlantic is The Republican Hardliners Aren’t Conservatives, They’re Radicals.

Ornstein's frequent collaborator and high priest of Beltway centrism, Thomas Mann, writes in a CNN opinion, GOP House can't claim to speak for America:

One talking point frequently used by Republicans to justify shutting
down the government while trying to overturn the Affordable Care Act is
that the House and its Republican majority are more representative of
Americans' views than President Barack Obama and the Democratic Senate.

That is preposterous and beside the point.

The ACA is law. End of
story. The House Republicans' attempt to nullify a duly-enacted law
violates the norms of our constitutional system. It is reckless
economically and an egregious affront to our democratic form of
government.

BillHouse Republicans have
every right to press their views in Congress but not to threaten to blow
up the U.S. and global economy by shutting down the government and
threatening public default.

We have elections for all
three key players — the president, the House and the Senate. If
Republicans want to change the law, they must do it the old-fashioned
way: Persuade the others to accept their position or win control of the
White House and Senate.

House Republicans lost
ground in the 2012 elections, lost the national vote for the House by
over a million votes and retained a majority only because of favorable
districting.

Obama won re-election by
3.9 percentage points and got an overwhelming victory in the Electoral
College. Senate Democrats retained their majority despite having to
defend more than twice as many seats as the Republicans.

House Republicans
represent a distinct minority of public sentiment. They carelessly
generalize from the echo chambers of their safe districts to the
national electorate.