Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey took the oath in January promising transparency in his new administration: "Government needs to be transparent and accountable to citizens."
Since then he and the GOP ninnies in the legislature have tried to: 1) eliminate the governor's daily visitors log, so the public and the press won't know who he is meeting with; 2) close legislative caucus meetings to the general public, making backroom deals easier and eliminating citizen input and oversight; 3) enact a gag order that prohibits school officials from discussing a great deal of education policy with the public; and 4) create a new law enforcement agency answerable only to the governor.
That's just the start of Gov. Ducey's Great Transparency Initiative, which also includes ramming through a $9.1 billion budget in three days that few people had read, let alone understood.
Legislative leaders are rushing to pass a $9.1 billion budget by today, offering little time for rank-and-file lawmakers and the public to figure out the details of a spending plan that was negotiated in secret.
Happily, some of the Republicans' efforts to shut out the public have been overturned once the press began reporting them, such as the visitors log boondoggle. Still, when you have nothing to hide, you hide nothing, which explains the latest attempt to keep people in the dark.
For at least two Republican administrations, Arizonans have been told we must cut corporate taxes as well as taxes on the wealthy in order to attract businesses and job creators. Sure, for a while we'll have to reduce funding for education, child welfare, healthcare and other social services in order to make up for the lost tax revenue. But eventually, say the trickle-down Kool-Aid drinkers, the new businesses relocating to Arizona will create more jobs, which means more workers paying taxes, which will fill the education and social service coffers.
That's what Republicans said, so you'd think that after whacking away at corporate taxes all these years, while cutting K-12 and universities more than any other state in the nation, we'd start to see results: More businesses setting up shop here, more good-paying jobs, and eventually more money for schools and other programs.
We have seen none of that. Corporate taxes have been cut, cut, cut, year after year, but Arizona's unemployment rate is still higher than the national average, and the jobs we are attracting are not the high-value kind that generate more tax revenue. Meanwhile, the state's schools consistently rank near the bottom in every performance and funding category, which turns off companies looking to build or relocate even more.
So what do you do when the monthly jobs briefing from the governor's office doesn't validate the administration's bass-ackward economic theory? Why, you end the briefing of course, which is what Gov. Ducey just did.
Following some less-than-spectacular jobless reports, the Ducey administration is scrapping at least temporarily, and perhaps forever, the monthly media briefings on the state’s unemployment situation.
The governor's office will continue to distribute monthly jobs reports, since federal law requires states to do so (and pays them for the reports). Gov. Ducey is eliminating the regular monthly meeting with reporters, where they received a deeper explanation of the numbers from state economists, which has been a monthly feature for more than 30 years.
Most likely, Gov. Ducey doesn't want reporters trying too hard to interpret the story behind the numbers—just like he doesn't really want people to look too closely at his supposed Cold Stone Creamery "success story," which launched his candidacy. So he's not only ending the briefings, Ducey fired the person in charge of analyzing the data because it appears he does not appreciate her findings:
That analysis has most recently been done by Aruna Murthy, the agency’s director of economic analysis. [Ducey spokesperson Kevin] Donnellan not only is ending the monthly briefings. He also said Murthy, who has conducted them for more than five years, has been fired...
But the move comes on the heels of Murthy pointing out some questions not only about the pure unemployment numbers but noting that many of the jobs actually being created in Arizona are in low-wage sectors of the economy.
Evidently Murthy not only questioned the interpretation but the veracity of the numbers, especially when the unemployment rate continued to slide yet the overall
economic picture sucked.
Murthy, however, said the data hide a much more downbeat picture of Arizona’s economy, pointing out that private employers in the state added only 300 new workers from the prior month, the smallest gains for any April since the end of the recession.
So let's just not tell the press and the public what's driving the shitty jobs numbers and everything will be hunky dory! Everything will turn around as soon as we pass more tax cuts. If not, we can just make shit up!
This isn't the first time Arizona's GOP squashed a report because the findings didn't fit their weird warped view. For decades the state was required to conduct an annual audit of private and public prisons. However, when reports kept showing that private prisons are more costly and less effective, the private-prison lobby in the legislature passed a bill that ended the annual requirement.
Don't fix the prisons, end the report.
Don't fix the economy, end the briefings.
Problem solved!