AZ News & Blogs 5/18/2010 (Sales Tax Vote is Today)

• If the government tells you to be afraid, then you know you need not be afraid 
• Rejection would trigger $862 million of contingency spending cuts beyond those already included in the budget due to the state’s loss of 30 percent of its revenue.
• Most of the contingency cuts were aimed at education. Those include $428.6 million for K-12 schools, $107.1 million for universities and $15.2 million for community colleges and $4.7 million for other programs.
• Budget and school officials said rejection of the tax increase would produce larger class sizes, reductions in specialized instruction and layoffs and furloughs for teachers and other school workers.
• Elsewhere in government, predicted cutbacks tied to rejection of Proposition 100 included layoffs of Highway Patrol officers, transfers of 3,000 to 5,000 prison inmates to county jails, new reductions of payments to hospitals and other health care providers, and reduced services for developmentally disabled adults and disabled children.
• Proposition 100 opponents argued that the state hadn’t cut spending deep enough and that passage of the measure would keep spending at levels that the state cannot afford. They also said a tax increase would throttle the state’s ailing economy by stifling retail trade.
• My Thoughts:  Notice how the government always uses fear tactics to get what they want?  That's the way it's always been, they use these tactics to take our freedom away and they will continue to use the tactics to take our freedoms away.  Note how they did this with the anti-illegal immigration law that recently passed, they slipped into the law the ability to send all our personal ID information to the federal government and to stop us and ask for papers with no true cause.  Lets stop the anti-freedom politicians and vote no on 100.
• Where's all the money going for schools for the recent rise in taxes? 
• Most schools received a 10% increase in Maintenance and Operating (M&O) funding from higher 2009 primary property taxes.
• In March special elections were held so schools could add an additional 15% override to their M&O funding.  Overrides are part of secondary property taxes and are calculated on Full Cash Value.
• We need to find out where all the money is going before we raise taxes, worsen the recession, and further depress much needed economic growth.
• My Thoughts:  There is no end to the money hungry politicians!
• Lessons From Venezuela’s 21st Century Socialism 
• The accomplishments of Venezuela’s “Socialism of the 21st Century” are looking very much like those of old-fashioned socialism with basic goods shortages, high inflation, negative growth, blackouts, water rationing, the persecution of Hugo Chávez’s critics, plus skyrocketing crime.
• My Thoughts:  Socialism just doesn't work...the public schooling system in the US is socialism and has proven not to work.  It only dumbs down the population and recreates an anti-freedom-loving people.
• Supreme Court Further Reduces Constitutional Limits on Federal Power 
• ”turned an instrumental power, dependent on Congress’s other powers, into an independent power.”
• the Court did further damage to principled constitutional interpretation in citing foreign law as support for its holding that life-without-parole (LWOP) sentences are unconstitutional as applied to juveniles committing non-homicide crimes.  
• My Thoughts:  The government can now hold you forever in prison without due process and after you've served your entire sentence.  Wait, the government could already do that.  Time to wake up I suppose.