As red states go there aren't many that can match the particular shade of crimson found in Arizona. Despite its national torment, the GOP has maintained a stranglehold on our state legislature for time immemorial, which makes for an excellent case study, as Democrats are literally (and continuously) blocked from participating in the budget process.
How have the Republicans fared? Not well, if you can believe such iffy indicators as bookkeeping and arithmetic, which project a budget deficit of around $2 billion. The only thing more telling than past performance is their laundry list of solutions to the economic morass that has materialized on their watch.
Republican governor Jan Brewer, who has been on the job for well over a year now, keeps saying the solution lies in a "temporary" one-cent state sales tax. Given that most Arizonans already pay about eight cents on the dollar, this would represent a net tax hike of 12.5 percent across the board, recession or no recession.
Meanwhile, the governor is pushing - well, pulling - for a "phased reduction" in corporate income tax rates, even though Arizona ranks in line with other states of similar scale, such as North Carolina, Oregon and Virginia, and far lower than such places as Indiana, Minnesota or Pennsylvania. She says this will lead (somehow) to job creation.
It's as if Reaganomics hadn't already fallen flat on its face, as George W. Bush's wetnursing of Big Business yielded just 4.8 million jobs over an eight-year period, and bled red ink the whole way. (Compare that to the tenure of Bill Clinton, whose tax-and-spend policies created some 23 million jobs, and balanced the federal budget at the same time.)
As usual, conservative lawmakers have also reached for the meat axe, hoping to chop their way out of the shortfall they created. The latest trimming came to $100 million, but the legislature wanted to hack off much more, with Brewer vetoing more than double that amount in proposed cuts to K-12 education.
They've also slated no fewer than eight state parks for closure. This is not merely a travesty for the locals, or a reduction in fees collected; it also makes Arizona less of a destination for tourists and the money they spend. How much sense does that make when tourism impacts our economy to the tune of a million dollars a day?
ADOT had its workforce cut by one-third, and will close 12 of its MVD offices this year, mandating that some residents travel 100 round-trip miles for services. Arizona Department of Public Safety (i.e., highway patrol) saw a budget reduction of 15 percent. State university funding shrank by $141 million.
In the meantime, many municipal services are being slashed, including public transit. Arizona has lost a greater percentage of jobs than most states, even Michigan. A good many states are in the same leaky boat, but only here do the attempted fixes amount to a game of Blind Man's Bluff.
All in all, nobody seems to be particularly optimistic about the near future, and yet they also seem quite content to keep sending Republicans back into their elected offices. Mental health experts will readily identify this behavior as sadomasochism.
In Arizona, we just call it business as usual.
pH 1.o9.1o
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