Patrick's Rants

Jan Brewer, who has just taken over the office of Governor of Arizona, in an act of pure Republican dogma wants to cut taxes and make government “smaller”. The state is looking at staggering budget shortfalls, public schools in Arizona (already funded the absolute worst in the US – 49^th or 50^th depending upon the year) are being asked to cut as much as 20% from their budgets. The state universities have had funding reduced by somewhere in the neighborhood of $250 million.

I understand there are many people in our state who like the fact that we are a pioneer state, the fact that there are still cowboys and the feel of the old west. But that should not be a reason to slash funding for basic education. Nostalgia for the one room school house and the unmarried schoolmarm should not direct our actions. The days when our kids had a barely passable reading level and worked the fields over the summer are long gone. Or they used to be. With the hatchet job being done to our Arizona educational system we are in danger of returning to the frontier age while the rest of the world looks forward to the 21^st century.

While I prefer that my own taxes stay manageable – and they have – I don’t believe that a tax cut now makes sense. When the tax rate – hypothetically speaking – is 10% and the base drops by 10% you only have 90% of your original income.

So Governor Brewer, before you slash and burn the education system from kindergarten through graduate school think about the future. Think about the effects of losing a highly-educated work force. Honeywell, Intel, Motorola, WL Gore and Google lose their employee candidates draining the tax base even further. Arizona is already one of the top four foreclosure states, when our biggest employers board up the windows we will soar to #1.

Of course there could be a bright side to this. Gov Brewer could totally break the state, bankrupting us. We could return to the days of the wild west and be bailed out, and then annexed by Utah, Nevada, New Mexico or the Navajo Nation. The US could sell the state back to Mexico, or California could bulldoze everything under and turn the state into a massive solar array. We can go back to exporting tumble weeds and dust storms.

At least Las Vegas would be happy that we are not sucking the water off the Colorado River anymore.