House fails to hold the line on taxes

House Minority Leader Jeff Hoover delighted Frankfort's big spenders this afternoon by not only voting for higher taxes, but also making a floor speech in favor of higher taxes.

The bill passed 66-34. It now goes on to the Senate. President Pro Tem Katie Stine has pledged to oppose the tax scheme.

Bellying up to the wrong table

House Budget Chairman Rick Rand, speaking in favor of a tax increase bill, just repeated the fiction about everything being "on the table" in the effort to balance the state budget.

If that were true, we would have repealed prevailing wage, ended corporate welfare and sales tax exclusions, dropped out of the Master Settlement Agreement, fired some political appointees, and called it a day.

Smart if true

Gov. Steve Beshear's reputation for meaning what he says isn't the best. Nevertheless, this sounds good:

"I am looking forward to starting work with my colleagues in the legislature on a longer term solution to the challenges confronting us. We will need to discuss how we create a tax system that is not only equitable, fair, and responsive to the changing nature of the global economy, but also keeps Kentucky competitive with surrounding states."

Ending taxes on corporate income and exclusions from the sales and use tax would be a nice start. Getting out of the corporate welfare game completely and repealing prevailing wages show a seriousness for the kind of reform Kentucky really needs.

Time for a Kentucky stimulus task force?

Now that Virginia is a blue state, they must feel obligated to set up web sites asking for citizen input on spending their Barack Obama bailout money.

So they did just that.

Can Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear be very far behind?

Get ready to wave bye-bye to Senate majority

Tonight's blow out loss in the state Senate special election combined with the compromise (read: cave in) on tax increases tells me Kentucky Republicans have gotten tired of having a seat at the table.

What else should anyone expect from a sell-out of principles?

Some good friends won't like this, but get ready to lose a lot more elections if the Senate decides not to hold the line on taxes.

Jim Bunning speaks

Sen. Jim Bunning said today the eligibility for full Social Security benefits should quickly be pushed from age 67 to 70. He said just doing this would put Social Security on "a sound financial basis until 2075."

He also advocated lowering cost-of-living raises for Social Security recipients.

Asked about the bailout bill currently before Congress, Bunning repeated that it was a step toward socialism and that most people understand that and oppose the bill.

"About 95% of my calls are against the bill and the other 5% are from mayors and government employees in Kentucky," Bunning said.

Bunning also mentioned a recent poll showing him ahead of all potential Democratic rivals. He said the results were closer than they should have been because the polling was completed during the ice storm, when much of western Kentucky was without power.

He said that he plans to run his own poll the first week of March.

Assume a woodshed...

... and watch the Cato Institute take President Barack Obama there!

Another $1.5 million down the drain

A Lexington Herald Leader news reporter went to a political press conference and came back a believer in very questionable, big government spin.

Continuing the recent trend of turning the Lexington paper into a one-sided blog, no opposing viewpoints to this cheerleading were provided.

Click here to read one.

Latest bailout recipient: Dan Mongiardo

Media types can't help noticing Lt. Governor Dan Mongiardo has been twittering out status updates via government press release very rapidly since he announced his campaign for United States Senate.

Your latest contribution to his campaign is copied below. Seems that if we were serious about cutting state spending, Mongiardo's political aspirations would be going under the knife.

KY Club for Growth opposes tax hike

Brian Richmond, president of Kentucky Club for Growth, says he is adamantly against raising cigarette and alcohol taxes to fund bloated government in Kentucky, but that if taxes have to go up conservatives should get something in return.

"They should give us, at the very least, a two-year moratorium on prevailing wage," Richmond said.

Kentucky would save $130 million or more a year by repealing prevailing wage policies on public construction projects. Of course, working out a deal like this would involve trusting Gov. Steve Beshear.

If this is pragmatism, we're in big trouble

President Barack Obama made a silly statement Saturday while complaining that nearly two-thirds of the electorate wants off his bailout train.

The Associated Press came to the rescue with their informed take on his comment:

""We can't afford to make perfect the enemy of the absolutely necessary," Obama said in his weekly radio and Internet address, sounding a note of pragmatism that liberal followers rarely heard on the campaign trail."

What?!?

If a trillion dollar bailout that no one really thinks will help the economy is an indication of what we can expect from the Obama Administration, then it sure would be nice if the media watchdogs would at least make him make sense about it.

Obama here rips to shreds a famous Voltaire quote that is most often translated as "the perfect is the enemy of the good." That means, of course, that holding out for perfect solutions sometimes prevents putting to work solutions that may be good enough.

But Obama's questionable "stimulus package" is not absolutely necessary. That's why we are so opposed to it. And the Associated Press weighing in with their opinion that his plan is somehow pragmatic doesn't do much for their credibility either.

Gouging saves lives in Kentucky

National media folks watching Kentucky dig out of the latest ice storm noticed the heroic -- and well-compensated -- efforts of a man Gov. Steve Beshear and Attorney General Jack Conway would burn at the stake for anti-Nanny State heresy.

Beshear and Conway haven't gotten the attention they so richly deserve for barking at the moon about prices when hard-working Kentuckians are trying to survive natural disasters.

If more people took the time to understand freedom rather than running for the quick soundbite, we would have better public policy discussions in Kentucky.

Thanks to Kentuckian in exile Caleb Brown for passing along the latest from Washington D.C.

Bunning economics plan makes more sense

Bailout opponent Sen. Jim Bunning today suggested via a floor amendment improvements to the increasingly unpopular spending bill Pres. Obama wants.

Bunning's plan would allow individuals greater ability to deduct investment losses.

Bunning said:

"Since the peak of the market in the fall of 2007, investors have lost $7.5 trillion in wealth. More than half of this amount is held in taxable accounts."

"If we do not adjust the limit, taxpayers will be unable to deduct real economic losses from their income tax, and this will result in higher effective tax rates."

"Two respected economists have recommended my amendment as a way to stimulate the economy. In an article in the Wall Street Journal titled “Let’s Stimulate Private Risk Taking,” economists from Harvard University and the University of Chicago wrote that my amendment would stimulate risk taking by reducing the downside of new investments and increasing the upside."

Further, Sen. Bunning advised removing significant corporate welfare provisions from the bill:

"My amendment also reduces the cost of this bill by about $2 billion, because I am also striking a remarkable provision that for the first time would allow corporations to use tax credits, even if they have no income. This is nothing more than corporate welfare and Soviet-style industrial policy."

"Never before has this body endorsed a refundable tax credit for corporations. This one costs a staggering $10.9 billion. It’s bad policy, and the money should be spent on broad-based tax individual tax relief that will stimulate our economy."

A hundred million here, a hundred million there

Two witnesses to the Senate Education Committee meeting Thursday came away with different numbers but the same story about the state's massively wasteful CATS school testing program.

Lexington Herald Leader education reporter Ryan Alessi reported:

"Sen. Dan Kelly, R-Spingfield, also said the CATS test has been sucking up too much valuable classroom time as the state spends $17 million per day on public school instruction. With 10 days of preparation, 10 days of testing and 10 days for mentally-spent students and teachers to recover, that's nearly a half-billion dollars lost, he said."

And Bluegrass Institute education analyst Richard Innes got this:

"At one point, Senator Dan Kelly outlined the full costs of CATS public school assessments, including the opportunity costs of instructional days lost to both administer the tests and conduct all the overly focused test preparation that we hear about so often. Kelly’s bottom line cost for CATS -- $700 Million."

Either way, Senate Bill 1 would get rid of the CATS program.

Will 69 million voters fall for this, too?

Just got a junk email from a bank invoking the Obama bailout scam and offering, fittingly, a scam VISA card with the false hope that "if Congress is willing to bail out Corporate America to the tune of a trillion dollars, why not have our sponsor try to help you!"

Interestingly, the reality of this "help" is somewhat less compelling than the hype. If you didn't catch it, a "secured" credit card is no credit card at all. It's a debit card just like the one any bank will give you for no cost when you open an account.

It gets better. The fine print reveals a $99.95 "one time" processing fee. Dig a little more, though, and you find this:

Amazing. So, the punch line on this helpful card is that you send in your money and the bank pretty much just keeps it. For example, say you send in $300 to open an account. The value of the account is immediately $200.05. The next two fees drop you down to $106.05. Then if you are stupid enough to use the card, as soon as you swipe it you start paying 19.5% interest on your own money.

Jim Newberry needs your call

The missing videotape that's part of the latest episode in the Lexington jail scandals has been located, according to a source inside city government, but continues to be hidden by city officials.

Please take a minute to call Mayor Jim Newberry and tell him to have the entire January 27 Budget and Finance Committee meeting posted to the city's web site.

His phone number is 859-425-2255.

10:30 UPDATE: The Mayor's office just called and promised to fix the problem. Thanks very much if you called. Either way, though, hang on to that phone number.

Take it like a man

Congress expands SCHIP, Kentucky loses

Gov. Steve Beshear has made a big deal out of signing up children for government health insurance and the U.S. House of Representatives just helped him waste our money even faster.

From the Cato Institute:

"SCHIP’s great expense stems from the fact that in many cases, it simply enrolls children who were already insured privately. Economists Jonathan Gruber and Kosali Simon estimate that out of every ten children added to the SCHIP rolls, six already had private coverage. Only in government is a program deemed to “work” when it covers four uninsured children for the price of ten."

If Gov. Beshear were really serious about putting Kentucky in position to grow when the economy recovers, he would consider encouraging Kentuckians to get off SCHIP rather than trying to get them on:

"One thing SCHIP does accomplish is to discourage work. SCHIP and similar programs create enormous disincentives to climb the economic ladder. A single mother of two earning minimum wage in New Mexico who increased her earnings by $30,000 would find no change in her net income: She would pay an additional $4,000 in taxes and lose $26,000 in SCHIP and other government benefits, according to data compiled by the Urban Institute for the federal government."

Read more here.

Obama bailout needs a bailout

As American support for President Barack Obama's $900 billion bailout plan drops precipitously, a group of Republicans are fighting back against Obamanomics:

Thanks for standing up against this, Sen. Bunning.

It will be no surprise to see the mainstream media full of news stories about how critical this bailout is. But one thing I didn't expect was to get two emails from the White House press office today inviting me to two different press conference calls about the "American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan." Tomorrow Melody Barnes, Director of the Domestic Policy Council will speak to "Southern reporters" at 1:30 and then at 2:30, Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood will be on at 2:30 talking to "Midwest Reporters."

What they lack in substance, they probably more than make up for in outreach.

Will KY legislators approve voter initiatives?

Kentucky House Minority Whip David Floyd has filed a bill sure to catch the imagination of active citizens across the state.

House Bill 217 would allow individuals to collect petition signatures to change either state law or the state Constitution via voter approval and without any action by the General Assembly.

Before you start buying clipboards, though, HB 217 first has to pass both the House and the Senate by three-fifths votes this year, go on the 2010 ballot, and recieve a majority vote of the electorate.

I'm not aware of a similar bill in Kentucky in recent years. It will be interesting to see what kind of treatment this gets from our legislators.