A steep budget deficit caused by plummeting tax revenues and escalating school voucher costs will be in focus Monday as Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs and the Republican-controlled Arizona Legislature return for a new session at the state Capitol.
The Legislative new year officially begins in the afternoon with the governor’s annual State of the State address The goal is to wrap up the legislative session within 100 days, but lawmakers typically go until May or June, especially when there are difficult problems to negotiate like a budget shortfall.
The state had a budget surplus of $1.8 billion a year ago. But it now has a shortfall of about $400 million for the current fiscal year and another $450 million shortfall the year after.
A tax cut approved by legislators in 2021 and signed into law by Hobbs’ Republican predecessor, Gov. Doug Ducey, replaced the state’s graduated income tax with a flat tax that took full effect last year. Arizona subsequently saw a decrease of over $830 million in revenues from income taxes, marking a nearly 30% decline from July through November.
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So depending on who you ask you get different answers because there are a few different groups working together, and at least half of them are using the other half.
So originally you had two groups. The first group for lack of a better term were the 1%, their goal is to destroy the government and install oligarchs that will allow them to write the laws to be whatever is most beneficial to them and allow them to more efficiently funnel all the money into their pockets. Their first order of business was to reduce or eliminate their taxes, followed by eliminating regulations.
In order to convince everyone else that they should be allowed to do these self serving things that harm everybody else they came up with the lie of trickledown economics and pushed that message hard using Reagan.
That brings us to the second original group which was the economic conservatives that were concerned by the US running a deficit for so long. They didn’t want to raise taxes so they decided the problem was too much government spending and/or inefficient government spending, and that if we just cut back things here and there or optimized spending to be less wasteful it would fix everything. The lie of trickledown economics was crafted to appease this group with the fake promise that government revenue could be increased by reducing taxes on the rich.
Fast forward a little ways and the first group is still around with the same policies and goals, but now the goal posts have moved for the second group. The first group has successfully convinced the second group that the government is broken and that there are large groups (mostly minorities and the poor) that are running some kind of con and stealing money from the government (the irony of course being that it’s almost entirely the first group doing exactly that). They’ve been convinced that government provided services are actually the problem and need to be eliminated.
They spent a decade or so trying to convince everyone that government programs should be shut down using various arguments, but because everyone else aren’t morons they were largely ignored. Ultimately they arrived at their current plan which is to just keep cutting taxes to the point where the government can’t afford to function and is forced to shut down.
So the current situation is actually the goal, they want the government to essentially go bankrupt, the first group because then there’s no one to tell them things like that they’re not allowed to dump toxic waste into everyone’s water supply or that they have to treat their workers like actual humans and not cattle, and the second group because they’re living in a delusion.
Trickle down economics didn’t start with Regan it was a thing for at least 100 years beforehand and was known as horse and sparrow theory.
The idea was that if you fed a horse enough oats, some would pass through for the sparrow to eat too.
Yes, it was an old discredited economic theory, but Reagan dusted it off and pushed it as his core economic policy. Before Reagan it was largely unknown and forgotten by the US public, but he put a huge spotlight on it, all as an excuse to justify cutting taxes on the rich. Unfortunately a large swath of the public believed his lies and we’re still dealing with the fallout from that today.
Classic Republican shitshow that democrats get blamed for and are responsible for cleaning up
Flat tax = let’s make the poor pay for services instead of the rich who can afford it.
Yup, stupid Republicans continue to do the same stupid thing in the hopes that the same stupid thing will garner different results and then Democrats have to fix their stupid mistakes, Republicans will go into propaganda mode and bash Democrats for attempting to fix their mistakes going this is fine as the state burns around them, the electorate will buy into their propaganda because, well Americans are honestly overall stupid with no critical thinking skills because of Republican’s successful assault on education, see vouchers, and elect Republicans back into office where they’ll fuck up all of things that Democrats did to partially fix the Republican’s dumbass repeat of history and move things even further into regressive territory.
We need great public schools. School vouchers to institutions that radicalize toward christo-facism should be ended. We need books, not guns.
You got Duceyed
Well, y’know, it’s that damn big govt making all the problems. This is all their fault. Somehow.
Living in a Red State has got to be the closest thung to living in a cult. Who the fuck rationally thinks cutting taxes to the only motherfuckers with money will fix anything? Hey, you’re fucking thirsty, right? Well here is what I’m going to do. I’m going to remove all of the lakes and sources of water! Isn’t that fantastic? Once the water is all gone and safe in my reservoir it will be much better for us to drink! Fucken rubes.
“Welp, time to cut more ‘woke’ from the schools.”
Maybe if they cut science and history they’ll save money.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
PHOENIX (AP) — A steep budget deficit caused by plummeting tax revenues and escalating school voucher costs will be in focus Monday as Democratic Gov.
Arizona subsequently saw a decrease of over $830 million in revenues from income taxes, marking a nearly 30% decline from July through November.
The voucher program lets parents use public money for private-school tuition and other education costs.
Concerns are growing in Arizona about shortages from the Colorado River system, which provides the state with about 40% of its water, and about shrinking supplies of groundwater and regulation in rural areas.
Calling drought the “challenge of our time,” Hobbs has limited housing development in parts of metro Phoenix over water concerns and canceled state land leases that for years gave a Saudi-owned farm nearly unfettered access to pump groundwater.
Worries about a record number of migrant arrivals on Arizona’s southern border could also be a potent issue for state lawmakers in an election year.
The original article contains 362 words, the summary contains 159 words. Saved 56%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
No sympathy from me. These AZ voters turned down a ballot measure for a really amicable deal to build a new NHL rink for the Coyotes and decided to put a dump there instead. The voters themselves prefered a dump to a place of commerce. Congrats you got your dump, and I get to make fun of yotes fans for their dumpster fuck of an arena situation.
But many economists maintain that states and cities that help pay for new stadiums and arenas rarely get their money’s worth. Teams tout new jobs created by the arenas but construction jobs are temporary, and ushers and concession workers work far less than 40 hours a week.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/public-money-used-build-sports-stadiums
Ah yes an article about a different stadiums in a different sport from 7 years ago clearly is relevant to a deal made in the future with this now longstanding issue in mind. How much money is the dump making them? AZ fucked up and just assumed they’d get the yotes tax revenue regardless, but with the current move eyeing making a deal on tribal land, well the deficits add up.
Like a less popular sport like the NHL is going to be really profiable. Getting rid of the flat tax and school vouchers would be more effective.
Tax code change wouldn’t really be very effective for an arena not on state land though so I disagree.
Sounds lke the voters dodged a moneysink.
Over the last 26 seasons, the Arizona Coyotes have at times been bankrupt, ownerless, a ward of the N.H.L., the subject of relocation rumors, and, more recently, in a prickly relationship with the owners of their home arena. The team has long struggled to draw fans to its suburban rink,
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/17/sports/hockey/arizona-coyotes-glendale-nhl.html
Arizona’s terrible NHL team is begging voters for $200 million to build a permanent home, but stadiums are consistently huge money pits
From your own source
evicted from its previous home in Glendale, can find a way out of this morass with a $2.1 billion plan to turn 1.5 million tons of garbage and surrounding area into a new arena with two hotels, a music venue, and housing.
Man how dare they ask for 200 million for a 2 billion plan that included cleaning up the area themselves and even adding housing instead of putting that burden on the taxpayers where it now rests again. Brilliant move. Its gonna cost as much or more to remove the trash and make the land available for any kind of non dump use.
Economists who have researched this topic for decades have found that the rosy economic impacts teams promise rarely pan out. “Though findings have become more nuanced, recent analyses continue to confirm the decades-old consensus of very limited economic impacts of professional sports teams and stadiums,” the Kennesaw State University professor J.C. Bradbury and his coauthors concluded in a February 2022 review of more than three decades of studies on economic impacts of stadiums. Even when adding in social benefits from stadium investments, welfare improvements from hosting teams tend to fall well short of how much the government spent to obtain it. Put simply, the authors found, “the large subsidies commonly devoted to constructing professional sports venues are not justified as worthwhile public investments.”
Stadiums are waste of money.
