BASEHOR, Kan. - In this month's Harper's magazine, the magazine's Washington editor, Ken Silverstein, puts together a scary picture of what right-wing Republican, Tea Party, no-taxes governance in action looks like.
Look no farther than Arizona.
In his piece, Tea Party in the Sonora: For the Future of G.O.P. Governance, Look to Arizona, he chronicles the results of unfettered GOP craziness. The combination of tax cuts and the current recession has reduced Arizona's revenues from $9.5 billion in 2007 to $6.4 billion in 2010. The article seems to have come down to one hugely telling quote from an Arizona citizen who did not want to be identified:
"People who have swimming pools don't need state parks. If you buy your books at Borders you don't need libraries. If your kids are in private school, you don't need K-12. The people here, or at least those who vote, don't see the need for government. Since a lot of the population are not citizens, the message is that government exists to help the undeserving, so we shouldn't have it at all. People think it's OK to cut spending, because ESL is about people who refuse to assimilate and health care pays for illegals."
It's an article of faith and dogma among Reagan/Goldwater conservatives that tax cuts generate economic growth in all circumstances. Unfortunately, last year's Arizona State University business-school study of the effects of the last 17 years of state tax cuts shows they "...have not had any perceptible effect on the state's economic growth." And the fact that Arizona has "privatized" even its capitol building and leased it back from its corporate owner (along with numerous other state buildings) speaks to the sheer lunacy of corporate privatization of public resources.
Tea baggers don't like being confronted with the facts, but the horrific consequences of insane behavior in Arizona should be considered as the conservative idiots in Topeka seek to gut more public services in the name of corporate ideology.
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