More Republican Tax Cuts for Arizona’s Wealthy at the Expense of Democracy and Public Schools

It is bad enough that Republicans in the Arizona State Legislature told pregnant women and poor children to p–s off when it came time to fund expansions to the state-run health care and KidsCare Programs.

Even Laurie Roberts, in her June 25, 2021 column for AZ Central noted, the KidsCare expansion provision would have only cost the state coffers $12 million with the federal government matching with $46 million.

Again, what does this say about Republicans working for all the people when they just passed a flat tax that, as the chart from the Arizona Center for Economic Progress below illustrates, skews more towards assisting the wealthiest in the state far more than any income group.

The lowest twenty percent will see a tax cut of $3.00 which would be fine if a person is used to relying on getting his or her dietary supplements from the McDonald’s Dollar Menu.

The top one percent who do not need the help gets a $30,047 tax cut. The state can not afford $12 million to put more children in KidsCare but can afford to give each member of the one percent in Arizona a $30,000 tax cut.

How nauseating.

What does it say about their economic management skills and long-term planning?

Look at how these trickle-down measures have fared historically in the past under the Reagan, Bush II, and Trump Administrations and judge for yourself.

Look at Kansas in the last decade.

Not very smart economic planning on the part of Arizona’s Republicans.

More Tax Cuts for Arizona’s Wealthy at the Expense of Democracy and Public Schools.

On Friday, June 25, 2021, the State House Republicans turned their attention toward helping their number one constituents, the poor wealthy who are always asked to pay more in taxes because …wait for it…they make more, by attempting to pass an expansion of the school voucher program and create a loophole to get around the Proposition 208 surcharge for high-income earners.

Readers should remember that the voters in the last two election cycles voted against expanding vouchers and approved greater funding for public schools through a surcharge on Arizona’s wealthiest (which amounted to a $35 tax on each thousand the person makes over their first $250,000.)

With a few Republicans siding with Democrats, the school voucher expansion (for now) measure has been defeated.

Unfortunately, the same can not be said for the resurrection of SB1783, a JD Mesnard dream that created a tax loophole for some of Arizona’s wealthiest to qualify as small businesses and get out of sending tax dollars to Proposition 208-Invest in Ed Coffers.

This move, if not beaten back at the ballot box in a referendum/ballot initiative, could take somewhere between $300 and $400 million of monies that would have gone toward increasing teacher salaries, recruiting new instructors and staff, reducing class sizes, and improving classroom instruction.

Again, how is this helpful to the long-term interests of Arizona’s economic development or the expansion of the state’s middle class, or lifting up of its working one when a wealthy person is asked to contribute $35 out of $1000 after their first $250,000?

It is not.

What does it say about a political party that attempts to circumvent the will of the people at the ballot box?

It says that people in that political party do not respect Democracy and the will of the people. If that is the case, do the voters really want those people handling the people’s affairs?

Hopefully not.

Arizona House Republicans also went along with prohibiting all K-12 public schools, community colleges, and universities from requiring Coronavirus vaccinations and masking.

This is another example of Republican stupidity because the people who will mostly suffer from these rules are their own know-nothing, science-denying constituents.

They also passed an amendment calling for a new Koch-inspired right-wing Civics curriculum without any meaningful debate.

Newsflash: the State already has one and I am pretty sure, as a History teacher, the current standards say Democracy is good and totalitarianism (including the Trump brand) is bad. Please click here to view. 

For more perspective on the Arizona Republican approach to public education and the budget process this year, please click below to see the floor speeches of Legislative District (LD) 18 Mitzi Epstein, LD 17 State Representative Jennifer Pawlik, LD 19 Representative Diego Espinoza, and Democratic Leader Reginald Bolding.

Representative Epstein is right.

This budget is “rotten.”

Representative Bolding is right.

This budget “directly attacks public education. A budget that does not set us up for the short term or long term. A budget that directly attacks Democracy, a budget that is appealing to the most extreme of a party because they are unwilling to work with 50 percent of the legislators who’ve been elected by the state of Arizona…”

To all the Republicans who thought they could ignore the will of the people and try to go around them with these flat tax and fiscal loophole schemes, the voters will see you again at the ballot box in 2022.

Do not expect all of these Anti-Democratic and education policies that you have enacted in the last days of the legisaltive session to survive either the courts or the voters say at the ballot box in 2022.

The fight is not over.