Arizona Capitol Times Your Inside Source for Arizona Government, Politics and Business

The swift and sweeping process used to enact historic state budget cuts has hidden major policy shifts affecting the state’s safety net for families with children. Virtually overnight, our elected officials gutted programs and policies developed with conscientious public debate, careful deliberation and clear purpose. At a time when Arizona has lost 315,000 jobs – an 11.6 percent reduction in employment – these drastic changes in public assistance policies have resulted in little or no help to struggling families that will lead to greater dependency and increased costs.

In response to Sen. Russell Pearce’s claims in the Arizona Capitol Times (May 17, 2010, “Trespassing law may turn more illegal immigrations into citizens”) that immigration attorneys ‘tie up the system or play games” or “fabricate and exaggerate issues” in immigration court proceedings, he grossly exaggerates our ability to manipulate a well-established, yet arguably broken immigration judicial system.

Robo-polls such as Rasmussen and SurveyUSA have proliferated because they are absolutely free to conduct. You throw a bunch of phone numbers into a database and have a large volume of robo-calls made over an IP telephone, and you can conduct the entire survey at virtually zero cost in three or four hours.

So what does the future look like in Arizona now that the Legislature and the governor have made the deepest cuts in health and human services in 25 years in the last two legislative sessions? It is not a pretty picture.

It has been awhile since the environment had a good session at the Arizona Legislature, but it has also been awhile since we have seen anything quite as awful as the 2010 Legislature.

A number of important legislative reforms supported by the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry and the Arizona Manufacturers Council made their way to Gov. Jan Brewer and were signed into law, including, for the second consecutive year, major regulatory and tort reforms.

The Arizona Legislature adjourned sine die on April 29, and the policy achievements of the 49th Legislature get a mixed review from a taxpayer’s perspective.

A recent guest opinion in the Arizona Capitol Times said: “The government shouldn’t pick winners and losers when it comes to military contractors; the marketplace should.” I could not agree more. However, I must disagree with the author’s statement about Congress being a champion for competition in the case of the Joint Strike Fighter (F-35). In fact, it has been just the opposite.

Drivers across the nation face more than 90,000 miles of crumbling highways and more than 70,000 decaying bridges, according to a new report by the Arizona Public Interest Research Group.

Arizonans struggling to find employment in these tough economic times will now have even fewer job opportunities in the months and years ahead as a result of the failure of H2250.