President Ronald Reagan once said, “You can’t be for big government, big taxes, and big bureaucracy and still be for the little guy.”
Well, in Arizona, we are fighting for the little guy. We’re reducing the size of government, slashing regulations and cutting taxes.
The pandemic left no one in America untouched, but today, Arizona is open for business and our economy is thriving.
During the pandemic, many Americans from ultra-liberal states that embraced lockdowns relocated to Arizona so their kids could still go to school in person and their small businesses could survive. Hundreds of companies are moving or expanding here. And when these companies relocate to Arizona, they’re bringing high-paying jobs.
There’s a reason that Arizona has become a beacon of economic prosperity. People and companies are tired of burdensome overregulation and high taxes, and they’re moving their operations to a place that embraces free enterprise.
Founding father and the second president of the United States John Adams once said that “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” What he meant was that objective, raw numbers don’t lie—and this remains true hundreds of years later.
We just got yet another example. A new data analysis from Harvard University, Brown University, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation calculates how different employment levels have been impacted during the pandemic to date. The findings reveal that government lockdown orders devastated workers at the bottom of the financial food chain but left the upper-tier actually better off.
The analysis examined employment levels in January 2020, before the coronavirus spread widely and before lockdown orders and other restrictions on the economy were implemented. It compared them to employment figures from March 31, 2021.
Yale, which protects its fragile students from dead white authors and offensive Halloween costumes, nevertheless featured a psychiatrist lecturing at Grand Rounds of her fantasies “unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, wiping my bloody hands, like I did the world a f___ing big favor.”
Grand Rounds is an educational presentation by which teaching hospitals augment routine clinical training with presentations of unusual cases or medical advances. It’s not a political forum nor a venue to permit social causes.
Yet Dr. Aruna Khilanani, a New York psychiatrist, gave a widely-advertised speech on “The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind.“ “There are no good apples out there. White people make my blood boil“ she informed the assembled doctors-in-training.
She backed up her opinions by “taking some actions. I systematically white-ghosted most of my white friends “including some “white BIPOCs.” Talking to white people is a “waste of time. We are asking a demented, violent predator who thinks they are saints or superheroes to accept responsibility. It ain’t going to happen. They have five holes in their brain.”
We’re well aware that there are bigots with pathological tendencies from both political extremes out there. Until now they haven’t been featured in legitimate academic settings. Not only that, her lecture was well received in some quarters.
A Yale psychologist pronounced her talk “absolutely brilliant”. A woman thanked the doctor for “giving voice to us as people of color.”
Dr. Khilanani was given space in the Washington Post to explain that any negative reactions were mistaken. She simply was concerned about “minority mental health“. She hoped to stimulate “more serious conversations about race,“ rather remarkable considering she had just claimed reasoning with whites was impossible due to their inherent evil.
After some faculty members expressed concern, the medical school leadership allowed that “the tone and continent were antithetical to the values of the school.” Their response was to limit access to the lecture video to members of the Yale community.
But their concerns were primarily with the vulgarity and lack of respect in the speech. They never apologized for or condemned the speech, instead stating that the School of Medicine doesn’t condone violence or racism. Which is nice.
To Dr. Khilanani “this was “suppression of my talk on race.” But she made an obvious point. Yale should not claim surprise because “they knew the topic, they knew the title, they knew the speaker,” Exactly. They bought it, they own it.
The doctor is hardly a lone wolf. A paper accepted by the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association instructed that “whiteness is a malignant, parasitic-like condition that renders its hosts’ appetite voracious, insatiable and perverse” and to which white people have a particular susceptibility.
Corporations spend millions demanding their employees accept that they’re secret, unacknowledged bigots. School children are called-out and demeaned simply for belonging to the wrong race.
Yet in spite of all the provocation to hate raining down from the cultural heights, America is not a racist nation. Look around you. Of course there’s racism (see above). But normal Americans today bear no ill will personally to people of other races and accept them implicitly. Racism doesn’t drive policymaking. Judging people on the basis of their skin color is considered unacceptable by most of us.
Even though America is the least racist nation on the planet, it’s still a work in progress. But among the woke population, emerging voices are urging an ethos of resegregation. The renowned “anti-racist“ Ibram X. Kendi openly teaches that “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.”
Free Americans have traditionally favored the opposite, liberal mindset of Frederick Douglass, Lincoln and MLK , urging true equality and comity among the races. Chief Justice John Roberts expressed this ethos in his opinion that “the way to stop racial discrimination is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
It’s time for choosing. Roberts and Kendi can’t both be right. Hopefully Americans will decide to work together for a future of yet greater equality and opportunity.
We can’t afford to lose the progress we have made. Bigotry is not OK, no matter what.
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.
The indoctrination needs to stop. And thankfully, many parents are fed up.
For quite some time, activists have been trying to force Critical Race Theory or similar programs into government and especially our schools. This movement combines Marxist theories of class conflict within the lens of race. It teaches that some races have been “minoritized” and are considered oppressed while those who are “racially privileged” are called “exploiters.”
These sorts of programs made their way into our public schools because proponents of Critical Race Theory are good at disguising it. They use terms like “social justice,” “diversity,” “inclusion,” and “equity” which seem harmless enough. So, you can see how easy it could be for a busy parent with a mountain of responsibilities to overlook such a curriculum.
But parents around the state of Arizona are starting to catch on. And they’re speaking up.
In 2019, Chandler Unified School District adopted a program called “Deep Equity” (note that keyword). Parents spoke out then, and the program was phased out.
Just a few months ago, Litchfield Elementary School District published an “equity statement” along with a set of “equity goals.” These “goals” were presented at a school board meeting by a “district diversity committee” because someone on the school board must have been using their Critical Race Theory dictionary. But parents and other community members voiced their opposition, and the district agreed to revise these “goals.”
And last month, parents in Scottsdale demanded more transparency from the Scottsdale Unified School District after some parents heard indoctrination from teachers while their kids were in school online at home.
It’s great that parents are speaking up. And they should continue to do so. But multiple states around the country have started to ban Critical Race Theory. And parents should demand that Arizona lawmakers do the same.
David Cook is a Republican politician elected to serve in the Arizona House of Representatives from the 8th Legislative District. Representative Cook was elected to the State House in 2016 and represents central and eastern Pinal County and southern Gila County. He currently is in opposition to tax reform.
When alerted that a postcard campaign was taking place on Wednesday the 16th to encourage him to listen to the stories of hardworking Arizonans that need tax relief he did provide the following social media tweets (@RepDavidCook), “ …Yes – “we” the people- not any one person, one party, one county- “We the people” of Arizona. Those of us that are truly conservatives – saving the taxpayers – Billions (or trying to) and paying off those debts – not kicking them down the road – for future generations.” A public school teacher then asked, for him to support the flat income tax rate. Now, more than ever we need tax relief. He replied, “How much are your HOA fees a year?” The response, “Respectfully, we don’t have HOA fees, we have Biden penalties.” Silence
Arizonans need to call Representative David Cook (LD8) 602-926-5162 and voice your stories about how hardworking citizens need tax relief. Tax relief is any government program or policy initiative that is designed to reduce the amount of taxes paid by individuals or businesses. This is the time to return money to taxpayers, not leave it in the hands of the government.
Catherine Barrett, an Arizona Master Teacher, has been called “the bravest teacher advocate in the state” by educators and lawmakers. She holds Masters degree in Education and had been teaching for 19 years.
Republicans in the Arizona legislature are on the cusp of passing significant tax relief for hardworking families and small business. With historic levels of surplus cash sitting in the state coffers (over $4 billion for FY 2022 alone), returning this money to taxpayers makes sense. In fact, it would have already happened if not for two lone holdouts within the Republican caucus, claiming the $1.9B tax cut is just “too big.”
Are they right? Should the size of the tax package be reduced to avoid a funding cliff in the future?
For an answer to this criticism, it makes sense to examine current revenue projections being provided by the Joint Legislative Budget Committee (JLBC). For years JLBC has been relied upon as an independent source for revenue and budget projections by the state legislature. JLBC has never been accused of partisanship or of “cooking the books” to produce rosy budget scenarios. If anything, they have historically been too conservative in their figures, often because they don’t use dynamic modeling for their growth projections.
With this in mind, JLBC is projecting that by FY2024, baseline revenue for the state will be over $14.5 billion, a figure that has been growing with each month. For perspective, legislators were budgeting just shy of $11.1 billion in ongoing revenue prior to the pandemic—meaning that Arizona is expected to see a 31% increase in state revenue in four years.
Where is all this new revenue coming from? While a portion of this surplus is expected from economic growth, that is not the only source. Much of this new revenue is from a series of tax increases that continued to be ignored by opponents of the budget.
Remember the “monumental” new gaming compact Ducey signed in April—the one allowing for sports and fantasy sports betting? That is projected to rake in $300 million of new revenue annually by FY2024.
