Arizona has a $2 billion budget deficit.  Needless to say, tax dollars are at a premium.   So why did the Senate just vote to subsidize movie producers?  No idea.  How many jobs did the old film tax credit produce in 2008 - 2009?  Forty-one (41).  And according to the...

"The Legislature has passed a bill giving an unelected individual the right to give away $25 million of your tax dollars to corporations." This was Senate Minority Leader David Schapira on the Deal Closing Fund he voted against. I suppose because he's elected, he has...

Not all proponents of economic development are satisfied the new tools in Arizona's tool box, courtesy of the the Jobs bill. Senate Bill 1041 would expand the new tax subsidies for certain activities only a couple weeks since the Jobs bill's passage (and since bills...

The legislature passed the "Jobs" bill on Wednesday, 2/16/2011 and Intel announced plans to build a new fab in Chandler on 2/17/2011.  Economic development supporters are confounded and conflicted.

The editorial from today's Wall Street Journal is excellent. Kyl's Consequences How to be an effective Senator. The U.S. Senate has 13 freshmen this year, and we hope more than a few of them have signed up for Jon Kyl's seminar on how to make a difference in what can...

Last night the Arizona Senate Judiciary Committee heard a bill that, if passed, would refer to voters in November 2012 a proposal to prohibit taxpayer-funded elections.  It's a straightforward amendment to the Arizona constitution that effectively bans the current...

MSNBC liberal talk show host Rachel Maddow likes the word "awesome."  On HBO's Real Time with Bill Mahr, Maddow teamed up with Pres. Reagan's former budget director David Stockman and poured a bucket-full of bunk about Reagan's economic record.  Wall Street Journal...

We've written before about the failures of film tax credits.  Here's another post.   If there are better examples of tax policies gone bad, I'd love to see them.  Check this one out that ran in the Boston Globe. Mass. tax credits used to cover movie stars' wages...

Lost in discussion about Gov. Brewer's FY11-12 budget proposal is the fact that she proposes to control future state spending by limiting revenue (and expenditure) growth to an ongoing 10-year rolling average.  While we would prefer a limit based on the state's...

If you thought Pres. Obama was a died-in-the-wool liberal, who would risk his presidency (and the number of Democrats in Congress) on his ability to ram through as much of a leftist agenda as quickly as possible, you were right.  But if you've also concluded that he...

There's been much discussion about ASU professor Paul Bender's eligibility on Arizona's Independent Redistricting Commission.  Bender appears not to qualify because he is the Chief Justice of the Fort McDowell Nation Supreme Court (commissioners generally cannot have...