by AZ Free Enterprise Club | Feb 20, 2026 | Opinion
By the Arizona Free Enterprise Club |
It feels like just about everywhere you turn, politicians are inventing new ways to yank more money out of your wallet. There are property taxes, gas taxes, grocery taxes, and more. We’ve even seen cities and towns push their own tax, utility rate, and “fee” increases. (How are those water bills treating you, Gilbert?) And now, some states—like California and Massachusetts—are pursuing a tax that would charge you a fee for every single mile you travel in your vehicle.
So much for affordability.
Earlier this month, California’s legislature advanced AB 1421. If passed and signed by Governor Newsom, this bill would create a “road user charge” pay-per-mile system for our neighbors to the west. It also includes studying how to capture out-of-state vehicles as well in case you thought your trip to Disneyland couldn’t get any more expensive.
If you don’t think such a tax is possible, think again…
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by AZ Free Enterprise Club | Feb 13, 2026 | Opinion
By the Arizona Free Enterprise Club |
On March 10, Pima County residents will decide whether to fund another 20-year, $2+ billion transportation plan after the Regional Transportation Authority (RTA) failed to deliver on the last one. Two propositions will appear on their ballot this month related to this plan.
Proposition 418 would approve the new “RTA Next” transportation plan. Proposition 419 would extend the existing ½-cent sales tax to fund it. Both propositions must be passed for the plan to move forward. If approved, the new tax would begin April 1, 2026, just a few months before the original RTA plan officially expires in June.
The RTA is an independent taxing district specifically for Pima County. Its board is comprised of elected officials from local, tribal, and state governments that approve and oversee transportation projects. Back in 2006, voters were promised countywide improvements to roads, transit, and other infrastructure, funded by a 20-year timeline and a dedicated ½-cent sales tax increase. Fast forward to 2026, and several projects are unfinished, or never even started at all. Now, voters are being asked to extend the tax for another 20 years to finish what should have already been completed. That’s not a plan; it’s a bailout.
The project list for the RTA Next consists of multiple road improvements, bicycle infrastructure upgrades, transit improvements, and more. Many of these are the projects left unfinished during the first 20 years. They continue to blame their failures on Covid, the great recession of 2008, population growth not matching projections. The reality is that the actual problem is staring themselves in the mirror…
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by AZ Free Enterprise Club | Feb 9, 2026 | Opinion
By the Arizona Free Enterprise Club |
Governor Katie Hobbs rolled out her budget last month and, unsurprisingly, it doesn’t add up.
Not only because her “solutions” don’t match the problems she claims to be solving, like suggesting we can make goods and services more affordable by piling on new taxes and fees, but because her budget quite literally just doesn’t add up.
While it’s become common for governors to release budgets built on rosier revenue assumptions than the Legislature’s more conservative Joint Legislative Budget Committee (JLBC), Hobbs’ proposal relies on projections so fanciful it resembles a fairy tale more than a fiscal plan.
Counting Chickens Before They Hatch
Hobbs’ budget is a $17.7B spending plan ($100M more than last year) that leaves a meager $37.8M balance at the end of FY27. That means her revenue projections leave very little room for error. Yet one of the more obvious facts about her budget is just how likely error-prone these projections are, a fact that Republicans during a joint appropriations hearing were sure to point out.
One of the most speculative assumptions Hobbs is making in her budget proposal is relying on $760 million of “reimbursements” from the federal government for expenditures the state has made for border security since 2021. That is a good chunk of change, and her budget is unworkable without it.
The problem is it is actually way more likely than not that even if the state receives something in the way of reimbursement, it will not be the full amount, and who knows on what timeline. Regardless, it is irresponsible to commit money out the front door that may never come in.
This is nothing new for Hobbs. Just last year she continued a COVID-era program that neither had legislative authorization to continue nor the ongoing financial allocations to support it. That wound up blowing a $122M fiscal hole in the previous year’s budget mid-session that Republicans had to mop up.
The Governor’s budget also depends on tapping the State Land trust for another $1.5 Billion. Setting aside whether its a good idea to raid the land trust set up for various beneficiaries (K-12, Universities, deaf and blind, etc), changing the formula for trust land distributions requires a constitutional amendment that would need to be approved by voters in November.
Hobbs’ “Affordability” Plan is Really a Chaotic Tax-And-Spend Plan
Hobbs wants to brand her budget as improving affordability, but it does just the opposite. Every idea in her plan is built around $1B in new taxes and fees and the hope that the bureaucracy can “manage” the cost of living while literally contributing to its inflation…
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by AZ Free Enterprise Club | Jan 31, 2026 | Opinion
By the Arizona Free Enterprise Club |
For years, the Left has been working tirelessly to flip Arizona blue. Armed with a secret network of tax-advantaged funds, political nonprofits, and union dollars, their aim has been to turn our beloved, freedom-loving state into the next Colorado or California. In fact, many groups on the Left waged high stakes to flip Republicans’ paper-thin control of the state legislature in 2024.
And how did that turn out? A historic landslide victory for President Trump while the Left actually lost ground in Arizona’s legislature. Apparently funneling millions of dollars to liberal causes doesn’t make up for bad ideas.
Now, with the 2026 midterm election a little over nine months away, the latest voter registration numbers are in, and they show an encouraging trend. Republicans have expanded their registration advantage over Democrats to 7.64%—the largest lead in state history—while Democrats continue their free fall in party registration.
Even more impressive is that these gains are not isolated to a few particular areas of our state. Every single county in Arizona has become MORE Republican since the 2024 election. That’s right. In the counties where Democrats have larger voter registration numbers than Republicans, the gap has closed. And in counties where Republicans have larger voter registration numbers than Democrats, the gap has widened. In fact, the gap between registered Republicans and Democrats in Maricopa County has increased by more than half a percent in just the past year.
Yet perhaps the most surprising trend behind this growing Republican advantage is that while Republicans have been able to register a lot of new voters, the same cannot be said for the Democrats…
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by AZ Free Enterprise Club | Jan 27, 2026 | Opinion
By the Arizona Free Enterprise Club |
What’s being sold as a harmless planning document is actually a blueprint to fundamentally reshape how West Mesa residents live and move about their city. The MesaCONNECTED Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) Plan has been in the works since 2021. Funded by a federal grant from the Federal Transit Administration (FTA), the plan covers a five-mile “transit corridor” in West Mesa and is intended to guide future land-use decisions in that area. At first glance, it appears benign, seemingly focused on growth and beautification. City officials repeatedly emphasize that it is not a transit plan and does not initiate any specific projects. However, taken as a whole, MesaCONNECTED lays the groundwork to transform West Mesa into what is effectively a 15-minute city (or even a 5-minute city, by their own standards) without explicitly using that label.
The plan draws inspiration from communities in Oregon and California, as well as Arizona’s own Tempe Cul-De-Sac neighborhood, all of which follow planning models that prioritize density, transit-oriented development, and reduced automobile use. The stated goal is to create fully walkable areas centered around “transit nodes” while making existing transit easier to access. The section of West Mesa encompassed in the plan includes major hubs such as Mesa Riverview, the Asian District, Mesa Community College, Banner Desert Medical Center, Downtown Mesa, and surrounding areas.
A central objective of the plan is to increase density and place housing closer to employment to “reduce vehicle miles traveled” (pg. 5). This is not a neutral goal. It assumes driving is a problem to be corrected rather than a freedom to be preserved. In a city like Mesa where families rely on personal vehicles for work, school, church, medical care, and more, designing communities to deliberately discourage driving punishes the very behavior that allowed the city to grow in the first place. Rather than responding to how residents already live, the plan attempts to reshape daily habits by making driving less practical and alternative modes more “convenient…”
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