Another Perspective
Neil Macdonald, the Washington correspondent for the CBC, has a reasonably thorough look at the dysfunctional mess that is my state in his article, The giant Ponzi scheme that is Florida.
Republicans are not fiscal conservatives, no matter what they claim. They refuse to accept the concept of “saving for a rainy day”, because they apparently don’t believe in rain. If they receive a windfall they throw it away on nonsense and then lower taxes to ensure it doesn’t happen again. If things go into a slump, they lower taxes to ensure it will continue longer than necessary.
It doesn’t occur to them to pay off bonds, i.e. retire long-term debt, or to save for bad times. Republicans want to continually run at a loss. They lie openly about states having balanced budgets. Issuing bonds is taking on debt – it is running a deficit. All the states do it, and then claim only the Federal government has deficits.
Many people have been consigned to political death for suggesting that the state needs to reform its revenue structure. The successive Republican governments have suggested that there really is “a free lunch”. They have been hoping for someone else to pick up the check.
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…Orygun occasionally goes through these political permutations. We are, after all, the only state other than New Jersey that forbids the personal operation of gas pumps. The state Republican party eventually lost its grip on the voters when it became apparent that all the rhetoric didn’t begin to match the actions and every daily newspaper in the state was running Doonesbury strips making national fun of the fact that we couldn’t keep our schools open for the full school year for reasons that didn’t have any connection to abortion or same-sex marriage…
That little ‘last recession’ episode spelled the beginning of the end of Republican party dominance in Oregon for the time being. Orygonians haven’t yet come to grips with the idea of having to “pick up the check”, but they have – at least for now – come to the understanding that cutting taxes and services may not be the only – or even the best – way to fix the problems we are facing…
Until we have an honest redistricting I don’t have much hope for anything changing. Republicans have have had fewer registered party members than Democrats for years, but nothing has changed.
There are too many people in this state who refuse to accept reality.
California’s f*cked up too, but for a different reason — for some lame reason, the California constitution requires a 2/3rds vote to pass a budget or pass a tax. So every year, the Rethugs in the Assembly have refused to pass a budget unless they get their pet agenda of lunacy written into the budget and tax hikes simply don’t happen. We’re going to get redistricting next year thanks to some initiatives passed by the voters that take redistricting away from the legislature and gives it to a panel of retired judges, but the Rethugs come by their 1/3rd minority status honestly (that’s about the percentage of Rethugs in the state), so we can’t have sanity until either Orange County secedes from California, or the idiotic 2/3rds requirement is banished. Yeah, like that’s gonna happen…
– Badtux the “Something for nothing!” Penguin
Badtux´s last blog post..Creating a story
Time for a initiative – the universal solution to all of California problems.
No one down here could figure out that a down turn and skyrocketing housing costs would doom the growth that has been fueled by people retiring with a decent income. Even with the slashing of house prices, Boomers will not have the money their parents had for retirement, so they will not be able to move.
Vacations are something for the top of the economy, not the middle class, so domestic tourism will die off, just as foreign tourism has died off because of the War of Terror™.
Ah yes… The “War on Terror”(tm). 🙂 Which legitimizes such things as this:
Sy Hersh: Cheney Ran Assassin Ring
Of course, Gov run assassination teams are not new. Virtually every nation has one or more (all very secret of course). Generally though, they are used as an extreme last resort (at least by most supposedly Democratic Nations). Even the former USSR was caution, unless that had a total nut like Cheney running them (in which case, the nut became a target eventually if any embarrassment surfaced). That wouldn’t happen to Cheney because… well, because the USA is such a Democratic, Moral, Ethical and just darned *nice*, Nation… And doesn’t do suck things as put a Gov sanctioned hit on a sitting or ex member of Gov. Well, at least they don’t (maybe) since Cheney has gone (well, officially gone anyway). LOL
Cheney has so damaged the US intelligence effort, it will be decades before the product becomes mediocre. It had barely recovered from Reagan, when these idiots took over.
He didn’t know enough to establish plausible deniability. He was so arrogant, he arranged things so he could claim credit for all of the “successes” which never happened.