On Wednesday, October 11, Arizonans learned the budget Katie Hobbs signed into law will possibly have a $400 million shortfall. This means the state won’t have enough money to fund the budget because it’s too big and is spending too much money.
The left wants to blame the budget shortfall on the implementation of former Governor Ducey’s state income flat tax a couple years ago. They also demonize the families participating in the state school choice ESA program. However, if it weren’t for Hobbs’ spending increase of $2 billion and vetoing a $2 billion smaller budget, the state would still have an outlook with a budget surplus.
Let’s review the short history.
In June of 2022, Arizona Governor Ducey signed into law the Fiscal Year 2023 Arizona Budget. The Radical Left and then-Secretary of State Katie Hobbs praised that budget for being bipartisan.
Moving ahead to the most recent 2023 legislative session, Arizona Senate President Warren Petersen and Speaker of the House Ben Toma wanted the new legislature to prioritize their most important responsibility — the state budget. Accordingly, in February, the state legislature passed a continuation of the same $15.8 billion budget from 2022.
Hobbs vetoed it. The budget Hobbs vetoed is the same as the one she applauded after Ducey signed it into law. This year, Hobbs called the budget partisan and extreme. The budget Hobbs decided was good enough to sign into law was $17.8 billion, exactly $2 billion larger than the budget she vetoed.
Hobbs insisted on a budget that is $2 billion larger even while many economists predicted Arizona and the nation are at risk for an economic slowdown due to rising interest rates. Forbes reported, “At the end of 2022, the National Association of Realtors predicted a 15.8% drop in combined sales and prices for the Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale [housing] market in 2023.”
The Federal Reserve, the nation’s central bank, currently shows the median home price in the United States is collapsing faster than any other point in recorded history.
If a recession occurs, Arizona will see less tax revenue. This would also have a negative impact on the budget’s revenue because people are spending less money; therefore, the state is collecting less in taxes.
While the Radical Left wants to blame the budgetary shortfall on the flat tax that benefits everyone, one thing is clear. The state of Arizona is spending too much money, and Hobbs’ extra $2 billion budget is destroying Arizona. It is her fault.
Jeff Caldwell currently helps with operations at EZAZ.org. He is also a Precinct Captain, State Committeeman, and Precinct Committeeman in Legislative District 2. Jeff is a huge baseball fan who enjoys camping and exploring new, tasty restaurants! You can follow him on X here.
The lives of our children and grandchildren will be impacted by the decisions we make today. Are your decisions creating the pathway toward individual liberties for current and future generations? Or are you simply allowing cultural whims that seem to shift with the breeze to overtake our nation?
Whether you personally own firearms or not, you should recognize the value of the right and the liberty to do so. And, you should understand your responsibility to protect these rights for all future generations. Throughout the unrest of the past several years, with mandatory lockdowns, riots, and defunding of police departments across the nation, millions of people have realized the value of personal safety and gun ownership. Many of these same people had previously been actively anti-gun and had naïvely voted away their liberties.
Life moves quickly. Culture perhaps even more so. We must be intentionally mindful of the past, present in the moment, and prepared for what the future holds. Whether we are engaged in the events shaping our world or not, time will march on. Many of those events, it seems, are focused on cultural and legal shifts in how Americans view our basic individual liberties, specifically as they pertain to our right to keep and bear arms. In these moments it’s worth asking ourselves, “Are you creating more freedom and liberty or are you simply allowing those vital elements to be stripped away?”
Leadership expert, clinical psychologist, and New York Times bestselling author Dr. Henry Cloud has summed up leadership in one simple phrase, “You get what YOU create or what YOU allow.”
Too often, we point our fingers at elected officials, at “the media,” and a whole litany of “thems” and “theys” who are eroding our rights and infringing on our liberties. And, there is effort being put in by those who hate freedom and who love to live with the boot of tyranny on their necks and ours. However, the final outcome always comes down to personal responsibility.
Our Founding Fathers and Mothers certainly embodied these principles of creating and allowing. They fought, bled, starved, and died as they CREATED this nation which ALLOWED for their children and ours to thrive wrapped in the precious and unique American Constitutional Protections. They were the counter-culturists of their time. They had every force against them, as we do today, and yet they changed the entire world.
It’s important to remember they were just ordinary people who finally said ENOUGH, we will no longer allow unjust laws to slowly smother us. They said ENOUGH, you will NOT take away our life-saving tools of self-defense that protect us from predators—those with four legs and with two. And, they looked little King George III right in his wild, manic, power-hungry eyes and said ENOUGH. We will not be slowly smothered by unjust taxes, regulations, and laws!
And, as you stand at the crossroads of history you must decide what part you will play.
Our Founders, the famous and those forgotten by history, handed down the keys to the shiny new nation, wrote us an owner’s manual, and prayed that we would value their hard work and sacrifice and try not to wreck this beautiful new experiment in freedom and liberty. Unfortunately, we have slowly and incrementally allowed those who hate liberty to chip the paint, bald the tires, and stain the upholstery with a splash of tyranny here and a dribble of infringements there. You can see it firsthand in overreaching policies that have been proposed or implemented, including certain red-flag gun laws and universal background checks.
Let YESTERDAY be the last day you allow those Representatives to feign ignorance of the Will of the People. Let TOMORROW be the first day that you begin to teach your children and our children’s children the lessons of World History. Let TODAY be the day you become involved in the political process at local, state, and federal levels, and make the United States Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Second Amendment the focal points of how you vet all candidates in every election.
When you do this, you will create a future that honors the sacrifices made by so many that will once again allow your children and your children’s children to live in a nation rooted in liberty.
Cheryl Todd has an extensive history of being a Second Amendment Advocate. Along with being a Visiting Fellow for the Independent Women’s Forum, she is the owner of AZFirearms Auctions, Executive Producer & Co-Host of Gun Freedom Radio, the founder of the grassroots movement Polka Dots Are My Camo, and the AZ State Director for the DC Project.
“The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” Unless you are New Mexico Governor Lujan Grisham, who thinks she can just declare a public health emergency and ignore what the Constitution says. Yes, in her view, she can declare an emergency and then all “rights” are on the table, and she is free to suspend them as she wishes.
Thankfully, this was too far for even anti-gun politicians like Rep. Ted Lieu from California and New Mexico’s own Attorney General who said he would not defend the declaration in court. In other words, it was so clearly unconstitutional that even the most radical gun control advocates distanced themselves from it.
Abuses of Emergency Powers During COVID
But it is an important reminder of the abuse of emergency powers we all experienced during COVID, and why it is critical to rein in these powers. While it’s clearly unconstitutional to suspend the 2nd amendment with an emergency declaration, most states over the last 100 years have granted extremely broad powers to the executive branch to declare so-called public health “emergencies…”
American school children are taught that they are being raised in a democracy, where elected officials pass the laws, bureaucrats administer the laws, and government workers dutifully carry them out.
That’s a crock. Americans at this time are mostly governed under rules generated by an unelected bureaucracy, the so called “dark state.” Worse, personnel and financial matters are controlled by the workers themselves through their government unions. The rest of us are left out of the loop.
It was in the 1960s, at the height of the “rights” revolution, that 38 states and the federal government first granted government unions the right to collective bargaining. Curiously, government workers already had civil service protections, and there were no abusive work conditions needing reform. Government employees were considered to have a moral duty to protect the public interest, not bargain against it.
Since the door was cracked open, there has been a relentless torrent of workers’ rights and benefits. In every bargaining cycle, workers win so many concessions from the bosses they elect that government managers no longer really manage. Unions do.
There are consequences. Baltimore schools have received heavy criticism for having 23 schools last year without a single student proficient (i.e., barely adequate) in math. Baltimore is hardly alone. Chicago had 37 schools last year with zero students proficient in either math or English and many other urban school districts have similar records of failure.
Normally, administrators faced with a crisis of this magnitude would radically overhaul their operations and personnel. But because of union controls, political leaders, school boards, and administrators are essentially powerless to make meaningful changes. In Illinois, an 18-year study found two out of 95,000 teachers were terminated for poor performance. The dismissal rate in California, the home of multiple failing districts, is even lower. In fact, almost every teacher is rated as excellent.
The disastrous closing of the schools during COVID and the attendant learning loss were also totally union-inspired. Long after it was well known that children were at minimal risk from COVID, intransigent unions refused to return to the classroom. The educational damage callously inflicted on our school children is a national shame.
Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer who killed George Floyd, igniting racial riots worldwide, was a known bad actor with multiple complaints in his record. But the police chief lacked authority to terminate or even reassign him. Union-imposed “due process” for police typically precludes interviewing the officer until he views all witness statements, then multiple hearings and reviews, and finally a chance for reprieve from union-selected arbitrators.
The process is so daunting that many supervisors don’t even try to address bad behavior. Of the 2,600 complaints against Minneapolis police officers in the prior decade, just 12 resulted in disciplinary actions, none of them severe. This inability to discipline rogue officers is a major contributor to the undeserved poor public image plaguing many police departments.
The outsized influence of unions has a single source: their ability to financially influence elections. Public unions in America collect about $5 billion in compulsory dues annually or $20 billion per election cycle. So, for example, newly elected Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, who will head the “management” team in union negotiations, received over 90% of his campaign funding from public unions, assuring the talks will go smoothly.
The captive New York legislature passed 21 bills to enhance public employee benefits in 2021 alone. In California, union-mandated rules are so lax that last year, 3,600 state employees received $100,000 each in overtime pay, very little of it legitimate overtime. In Illinois, a state that would declare bankruptcy if it were a private enterprise, Governor J.B. Pritzker settled his political debts with a 19.28% raise for 35,000 state employees.
Put simply, government unions have used collective bargaining and campaign cash to seize effective control of government and run it for their own benefit. A Republican government can’t work if authorities selected through the democratic process don’t have the ability to do their jobs.
We need to find fearless leaders who will have the guts to take on the unions and once again restore government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
Dr. Thomas Patterson, former Chairman of the Goldwater Institute, is a retired emergency physician. He served as an Arizona State senator for 10 years in the 1990s, and as Majority Leader from 93-96. He is the author of Arizona’s original charter schools bill.
“Don’t California our Arizona.” It’s a saying we’ve had around here for quite some time, and for good reason. Not only is California known for having ridiculously high tax rates, but woke policies in the state have:
The list could go on and on. But it’s pretty clear. California’s policies have been a disaster, so much so that the state once ran out of U-Hauls because so many people were leaving. And yet, despite all this, Arizona lawmakers still decided to send your hard-earned dollars to woke Hollywood liberals through a movie tax credit bill last year. And while we hate to say we told you so, that decision now appears to be coming back to haunt Arizonans…
Amid the passage of historic school choice legislation in Arizona, the educational opportunities available to students and families today are unparalleled with the state’s universal ESA program. In addition to providing Arizona families with voice, choice, and agency in their child’s education, the ESA program has the potential to save Arizona taxpayers considerable funds from future school district bond and override measures.
However, to realize these savings, a long overdue conversation about rightsizing Arizona’s public schools is necessary. Despite significant population growth within Arizona, the enrollment forecasts for most school districts anticipate a period of long-term decline due to lower childbirths, affordability, and alternative options. This demonstrates a pressing need to review the budgets and assets of public school districts and align them with future enrollment projections.
Given the significant competition from the rise in homeschooling, as well as charter and private schools, public schools are no longer the only game in town. As a result, greater scrutiny from local taxpayers is needed in holding school districts fiscally accountable by questioning their need for additional funds through bonds and overrides.
What Are School Bonds & Overrides?
School bonds are loans that school districts sell to investors, who are repaid through the district’s future property taxes. These bond funds have specific limitations on their use and cannot be used to increase staff salaries. In most instances, these funds are leveraged for infrastructure projects involving the construction of new facilities or upgrades to existing ones. In contrast, overrides go directly to school districts and can be used for staff salaries and various programs outlined by the district requesting the override.
This November, a total of 23 school districts in Maricopa County will have bond and/or override measures on the ballot. Among these 23 districts, at least 4—Kyrene Elementary School District, Mesa Unified School District, Gilbert Unified School District, Scottsdale Unified School District—are in dire need of rightsizing before requesting additional funds from taxpayers based on their pronounced decline in enrollment.
In particular, Mesa USD, the state’s largest school district, enrolls fewer students today than it did in the fall of 1990. Yet, the district’s real estate portfolio somehow contains 78 schools, in addition to various non-instructional facilities and offices throughout the city. Mesa USD, as well as surrounding districts in similar positions, need to do right by taxpayers in exploring the sale of underutilized real estate before passing the buck to taxpayers.
As seen in the table below, only Gilbert USD has shown an increase in enrollment since the fall of 2000, and none of the districts can report an increase in enrollment in the last 10 years. Given the growth in ESA adoption and charter school enrollment, the pragmatic move is to respond to these declines now by rightsizing these districts, pursuing the sale of district assets, and removing administrative bloat.
Among the clearest signs of waste and inefficiency can be found in the amount of unspent federal pandemic relief funds provided to schools around the country. In the case of the 4 school districts requesting additional funds from taxpayers, they collectively still have access to tens of millions in unspent, flexible funds that are set to expire in a year.
What this experiment in “helicopter money” confirms is that the problem ailing local school districts is not a lack of funds, but rather their inability to direct funds efficiently. In the absence of a public monopoly, this decline in public school enrollment will continue to eat into taxpayers’ wallets with the additional forces of demographic shifts, affordability, and competition from the growing number of viable and efficient alternatives in the form of charter schools, private schools, microschools, and homeschool co-ops.
In adjusting to this historic era of school choice, the need for fiscal accountability remains essential on behalf of public school districts that have been reluctant to change and control their costs. To avoid perpetually funding buildings and bureaucracy, local taxpayers and residents must ensure their voices are heard.
Arman Sidhu is a lifelong Arizona resident and previously worked in K-12 education as a principal and teacher. He currently leads a nonprofit microschool.
