Education Funding is UNDER ATTACK!
Contact your legislators today
Education is UNDER ATTACK! Programs are at stake! Jobs are at stake!
Elected officials and candidates are playing political football with our profession and livelihood! The proposals that are floating out there are irresponsible, unfounded, and could be catastrophic if adopted by state legislators.
Lawmakers need to hear from you directly on how these cuts would impact your work and your students if you're an educator and your children if you're a parent. Your REAL story is what will make the difference! Please contact your legislators today. Call 1-800-992-0973 or click here to send them your message today…because we can’t take a gamble on our future! (Emphasis mine)
Instead, the NVSG is likely to be a coalition of public employee unions and other rent-seeking special interests eager to craft a deal that makes all of them happy — at the taxpayers' expense, of course. Those who would be required to finance the grandiose schemes that result from these "stakeholder processes" are rarely considered relevant "stakeholders" themselves.For the reasons above, the Nevada Tax Consumer's Vision Stakeholder Group is a sham. Liberal legislators will use its skewed and illegitimate findings to justify calls for tax increases in 2011. Nevada's citizens should know the truth about the N(TC)VSG and reject legislators' soon-to-be announced call for increased taxes.
With 10 short months left to cement his legacy as a lawmaker, Assemblyman Morse Arberry has found himself isolated and alone on one issue from his peers: he does not pay his taxes and fails to pay his debts, now totaling nearly $500,000…I guess it's easy to balance the state budget when you can take money from taxpayers, like the legislature did when it passed a record-setting, job-killing, billion-dollar, secret tax increase in the last legislative session.
Arberry joined the legislature in 1985 and has served on the Ways and Means Committee nearly his entire time in office. That powerful group controls spending and a large part of the tax revenue for Nevada.
Standing beside his Mercedes-Benz sedan outside the non-profit Urban League, where Arberry works, the Democrat said his real estate company, Canyon Lake Mortgage, had many problems over the last few years.
He repeated the same explanation used weeks ago that he needed to speak to fellow investors to understand the true picture of what was happening with the homes. All six are listed in Arberry's name, however.
"It's a public record. I'm not trying to hide it," he said.
Arberry owes more than $2,200 dollars at his Walker Street address near Martin Luther King and Washington. The bill has not been paid since May of 2008, on the same day the I-Team's initial story on tax problems first aired…
The back taxes are not Arberry's only financial problem. Arberry owes more than $496,000 in homeowner association dues, foreclosing homes, and sewer and trash liens…
"What I saying is that you won't be calling me," he said. "I've been in the legislature for 25 years and I think I did a damn good job balancing the budget based on moneys we had to work with," Arberry said.
When reminded he appears to have problems balancing his own budget based on the toll in debts, he walked away. "I'm not going to discuss my personal issues with you. You have a nice day," he said.
After all the promises, will taxpayers be stuck with the monorail's bills?There are so many salient points here it's hard to know where to begin.
Since the inception of the Las Vegas Monorail, Nevadans have been repeatedly reassured that they will not wind up on the hook for its bills.
Nevermind the high salaries monorail executives and board members are getting, that won’t ever wind up coming out of the public’s pockets.
The Nevada Business and Industry Department’s issuance of $650 million in tax-exempt bonds to construct the transit system? Not to worry, no liability there.
Granting state sales tax and county property tax exemptions to the monorail? Yes, it helped the monorail system avoid putting millions of dollars in the public coffers, but it was the right thing to do.
Clark County’s approval of the monorail’s exclusive franchise agreement? Just a formality.
Having a five-member board appointed by the governor to oversee the operation? That’s just to protect taxpayers’ interests.
Now that the monorail’s long predicted bankruptcy is in front of a federal judge, however, the cozy relationship between the system and state and local governments has become a crucial issue and is again raising the question of whether taxpayers will wind up on the hook for any or all of the monorail’s $500 million to $1 billion in debt.
The conservative Winston Churchill was often at odds with Clement Attlee, leader of the Labor Party, which advocated a greater role for government in economic policy. Churchill once entered a men's room to find Attlee standing at the urinal. Churchill took a position at the other end of the trough.PLAN and other liberals won't be satisfied with just increasing the taxes on mining. (See Nevada Vision Stakeholder Group) Every time liberals (or conservatives) in government start picking winners and losers, the government becomes more convinced that it needs more money to run things, and that leads to more tax increases and less economic growth in the long run.
"Feeling standoffish today, are we, Winston?" Attlee asked.
"That's right," Churchill responded. "Every time you see something big, you want to nationalize it."
The Index analyzes just how economically “free” a country is, and this year America saw a steep and significant decline, enough to make it drop altogether from the “free” category, the first time this has happened in the 16 years we’ve been publishing these indexes. The United States dropped to “mostly free.”The most embarrassing part about this is that Canada is more economically free than the United States. And economic freedom is very important in many areas of life.
The drop in rankings is notable as it comes in the same week that marks the one-year anniversary of President Barack Obama’s inauguration. By any standard, over the last year Americans’ overall wealth and prosperity has continued to decline. Americans, in fact, are more likely than ever to believe that their children and grandchildren will be worse off than the current generation. They believe future generations will live in a less prosperous and less economically mobile America. The traditional American faith in upward economic mobility – widely understood to be the American Dream – seems more elusive now than ever.
Economic freedom is the fundamental right of every human to control his or her own labor and property. In an economically free society, individuals are free to work, produce, consume, and invest in any way they please, with that freedom both protected by the state and unconstrained by the state. In economically free societies, governments allow labor, capital and goods to move freely, and refrain from coercion or constraint of liberty beyond the extent necessary to protect and maintain liberty itself…
Studies in this and previous editions of the Index of Economic Freedom demonstrate important relationships between economic freedom and positive social and economic values such as per capita income, economic growth rates, human development, democracy, the elimination of poverty, and environmental protection. For further information, see especially the Executive Highlights and Chapter 2: Fifteen Years of Advancing Freedom
Geoffrey Lawrence, a fiscal policy analyst for the Nevada Policy Research Institute, the conservative think tank, said opting out of Medicaid would not result in thousands of Nevadans going without health care or leaving unpaid bills at emergency rooms.The other benefit of withdrawing Nevada from Medicaid is that it would make the federal government pay for its own program, instead of forcing the states to pick up some of the tab.
Under provisions of the Senate-approved bill, residents without health care could receive federal subsidies to allow them to buy private health care policies, he said.
For the most poor, a 100 percent subsidy would be given. Others would pay up to 9.8 percent of their income.
"They probably would receive better health care than under Medicaid," Lawrence said.
He said some doctors refuse to treat Medicaid patients because payments for treatment are too low.
Gibbons’ actions may soon resonate in other state capitals as policymakers nationwide bridle at Congress’s dictating how limited state resources should be allocated. Harry Reid’s increasingly makeshift proposals are giving states every incentive to throw in the towel on Medicaid.
Part of the problem in education is that the schools have not been able to attract and retain top candidates because teaching jobs, which require extensive education credentials, don’t pay well. Teachers should be held accountable — and bad teachers have no place in a classroom — but we also believe they should be paid like the professionals they are with the heavy responsibility they carry.
*The U.S. government has spent about $100 billion on Head Start since 1965. The results could have been duplicated by simply burning $100 billion in cash.The study used a gold-standard, random assignment design and had a very large nationally representative sample. This was a well done study (even if it mysteriously took more than 3 years after data collection was complete to release the results).
For students who were randomly assigned to Head Start or not at the age of 4, the researchers collected 19 measures of cognitive impacts at the end of kindergarten and 22 measures when those students finished 1st grade. Of those 41 measures only 1 was significant and positive. The remaining 40 showed no statistically significant difference. The one significant effect was for receptive vocabulary, which showed no significant advantage for Head Start students after kindergarten but somehow re-emerged at the end of 1st grade.
And just what deals were Big Labor, the leftist majorities in Congress and the Obama administration making behind closed doors? How to pay for President Obama’s likely $1 trillion health care plan without raising taxes on one of the President’s most loyal constituencies: labor unions. Specifically, Big Labor reportedly has struck a deal with health care negotiators to exempt union members from the 40% excise tax on high-priced health insurance premiums. By some estimates, the tax would hit one in four union members. Now Big Labor will get all of the big government health care spending they always wanted, but they will not have to pay for it.This isn't just another example of why the government shouldn't be picking the winners and losers. It's also a preview of how health care will be rationed once (and if) the government takes it over.
And Obamacare’s Big Labor handouts don’t end there. The legislation also sets aside $5 billion to subsidize the costs of employer health benefits for early retirees. As Heritage fellow James Sherk notes, few nonunion employers, of course, pay pension and health benefits for workers to retire at 55. And then there’s the small business exemption from the employer mandate for businesses with less than 50 employees. At first this applied to all small businesses, but after aggressive lobbying by Big Labor, non-unionized construction businesses were unexempted. Big Labor lobbyists explicitly admitted they wanted to use Obamacare’s job-killing employer mandates as a competitive advantage to drive non-unionized firms out of business.
So where does the White House and Congress propose to regain the revenue lost from exempting unions from the health care excise tax? The people who fund job creation: investors. The Obama administration wants to apply the Medicare payroll tax not just to wages but to capital gains, and for the first time ever, to dividends and other forms of investment income. This tax will hit seniors the hardest since many of them live off their dividend and interest income, in addition to their pension and Social Security checks. But it also hurts us all since high taxes on capital gains, dividends, interest and business income increase the cost of capital, thus depressing investment at the very time the economy needs new investment to grow and create jobs.
Eureka! Why don't we take over Nevada?
That revolving door for lobbyists and former officials? Still open.
Health care negotiations televised on C-SPAN? Campaign gimmick.
Waiting five days before signing legislation? Not even close to happening.
If you want to talk about ethical behavior to Washington, I suggest you start with Timothy Geithner, Tom Daschle, Nancy Killefer or Vivek Kundra.
“verbal, written, or physical acts of intimidation, coercion, interference, frivolous claims, discrimination, and sexual or other harassment motivated, in whole or in part, by bias based on actual or perceived race, ethnicity, color, religion, creed, sex (including gender identity or expression, or a pregnancy related condition), sexual orientation, national origin, military status or military obligations, disability (including veterans with service-connected disabilities), age, marital status, physical appearance, political affiliation, or on the basis of exercise of rights secured by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.”(emphasis mine).
Yet the IFC's tax study is about much more than merely a new corporate income or gross-receipts tax. It's also intended to give cover for unprecedented expansion in the size and power of government. The IFC instructed Moody's not simply to consider how to reduce revenue volatility so that state government can continue its current operations. Moody's must consider how to fund a bevy of new spending programs to be proposed by a "stakeholder" group convened by the IFC.
The Nevada Vision Stakeholders Group, as it is called, is nothing more than a collection of special-interest groups — primarily, public employees and union representatives. The NVSG's ostensible purpose is to develop "quality of life" targets for residents of Nevada over the next five, 10 and 20 years, plus ways to achieve those targets.
10:18 A passing comment from Assemblymen Anderson reveals the true purpose of this study. "We don't have money. That's the reason we're doing the study."The agenda is here. They are not going to be streaming it over the internet — hmmm I wonder what they don't want you to see — but I will do my best to give you a sense about what's happening.
Sen. Harry Reid will speak at a health insurance reform event in Las Vegas this week. Join him to learn more about what this important legislation will do for Nevadans.
Health Insurance Reform Event with Sen. Harry Reid
When: Thursday, January 7, 2010. Please arrive at 4:30 p.m. Program begins at 5 p.m.
Where: Judy Bayley Theatre on the campus of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
RSVP: rsvp@nvdems.com or 702-737-8683
PLEASE NOTE: Parking for this event will be in the large parking garage off of Cottage Grove Avenue and Maryland Parkway. From Flamingo, head south on Maryland Parkway; Cottage Grove Avenue is the first right. The parking garage will be on the left-hand side. Please park ONLY on floors 2-6.
A parking map can be viewed here: http://maps.unlv.edu/PDF/main-parking-color-abbrev.pdf. The parking garage is marked as "A" on the map. Class is currently not in session, so parking should be better than usual.
To attend this event, you must RSVP with your name and telephone number to rsvp@nvdems.com or 702-737-8683.
For security reasons, do not bring bags. Please limit personal items.
"Today is a day of hope for Nevada's children thanks to the governor's proposed education reforms," said NPRI analyst Patrick R. Gibbons. "For 50 years, Nevada education policy has misallocated spending to create union jobs, rather than educate our children. The results speak for themselves. While Nevada's inflation-adjusted, per-pupil spending has nearly tripled over the past 50 years, student performance has been stagnant.
"If enacted, Gov. Gibbons' proposals would amount to a win-win both for Nevada's families, particularly those with low incomes, and for the state," he added. "Under school-choice programs, parents have the freedom to remove their children from failing schools and select one that better fits each child's unique needs and abilities. Additionally, all Nevadans would benefit by dropping budget-busting programs that fail to improve student achievement, such as collective bargaining, full-day kindergarten and class-size reduction."
Here’s my prediction: Years from now, it will turn out that the biggest story of 2009 was the Tea Parties and the meteoric rise of their standard bearer, Sarah Palin, after her strange July resignation from Alaska’s governorship.
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