Beshear gives Kentucky an Obama

Gov. Steve Beshear borrowed the rhetoric of Pres. Barack Obama yesterday in congratulating himself for his smoke-and-mirrors fix of Kentucky's government spending problem:

Just last Saturday, Obama was saying the same thing about his bailout of the cities and states:

This is what Republican leaders in the Kentucky House and Senate have signed up with? Unbelievable.

If you liked Tax Jam 2009, just wait

The Kentucky Senate voted this morning to raise taxes and to raid the public employees' health fund of $50 million.

Can't imagine where the raid idea came from, since a mere seven months ago the Senate majority seemed to have a pretty good handle on the dire situation in public employee benefits. But the tax increase train never had to leave the station.

If the people behind the tobacco and alcohol industries had only realized that this wasn't about being unfair to the people who make, distribute, and consume their products, their opposition may have been more effective.

These tax increases and the health fund raid won't provide "enough" money to hold back future tax increases and smoke-and-mirrors transfers. Too bad the tobacco and alcohol folks never seemed to realize that the issue wasn't about just them, but was about the size of government all along.

Text messaging is best

Tax raisers in the state Senate are currently one vote short on HB 144. Will your Senator fall into the big government trap?

9:37 AM Update: They just came back in. Wonder who folded?

Senate, don't be as cynical as the House

The theme for this week in Frankfort has been politicians saying one thing and meaning another. A bipartisan Gang of 11 House members betrayed a pledge to their constituents to never support a tax increase. That same Gang also joined 54 fellow House members in tossing aside their seven month old promise to stop making the public employee benefits debacle worse.

Then it was House Budget Chairman Rick Rand's turn.

"We felt it was important that we let the citizens of Kentucky know," he told his Budget Committee, "that everything would be on the table: all cuts, any potential revenue measures, and anything we could do to bring this budget into balance."

Then, presented a commonsense amendment by Rep. Joe Fischer to stop forcing Kentucky taxpayers to pay excessive union wages for public construction projects, Rand spit the bit. Fischer's measure didn't even get a vote. Others tried the same thing on the tax increase bill with the same result.

Unless the Senate's intention is to simply join their friends in the House in raising taxes, they should restore Fischer's amendment and remove the Health Fund raid in HB 143. It also hardly makes sense to allow Beshear to restore funds to prior spending cuts as the bill does with borrowed money. You remember how overextending got us into this mess, right?

Come on, guys. This is ridiculous.

Barack Obama wants us to trust him

Kentuckian in exile Caleb Brown of the Cato Institute wonders why Pres. Barack Obama is playing "hide the details" with his big bailout bill:

"If this legislation is such a good idea, why don’t we get to look at it?"

Seems Obama is disappointing some who thought he was serious when he promised to, you know, not be so secretive about important stuff.

Will Kentucky rob Peter and Paul both?

Federal governments all over the world are printing "stimulus" money faster than grass runs through a Kentucky Derby champion. In Frankfort, politicians are breaking promises just as fast.

It's about to get worse.

Part of the deal to "raise revenues" for the state is, apparently, agreement to allow Gov. Steve Beshear to raid the public employee fringe benefits accounts of $50 million.

Just to get us through this temporary problem. Until the next one, of course.

Whatever happened to this guy?

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.