AZ Gov Scrooge McDucey's Slush Fund

This week, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich posted another of his tremendously succinct and poignant videos, this time explaining Paul Ryan's agenda and why it's BAD for America.




Terrible idea number 4 is Turn Medicaid and other federal programs (for the poor) into block grants. It's about letting the states decide how to allocate those block grants. Reich calls it giving "Republican state legislatures and governors slush funds to do with as they wish."

That, by the way, is how Arizona has gotten away with limiting TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, which before Bill Clinton's Welfare Reform Act of 1996 was known as AFDC, or Aid to Families with Dependent Children; TANF also replaced the JOBS program) assistance to poor families to a lifetime maximum of only TWELVE months of benefits. The 1996 federal legislation only set a benefit limit of 60 months, which -- theoretically -- could be enough to prepare a single parent for the job market, IF there were jobs available at the end of the benefits.

This while our state has SEVERELY limited child care subsidies (because the federal funding is a BLOCK GRANT, and NO state general fund monies are provided) along with education and training benefits. How can this be considered anything but draconian? Young single mothers don't have the resources to hire powerful lobbyists in DC or in Phoenix. But the same Republicans who want to force those women to give birth to babies they aren't prepared to support have ZERO compassion for the women or their post-birth babies. And they refuse to adequately fund the programs or require businesses to provide living wages that would empower them to rise up out of poverty.

Today, McDucey revealed his latest state government budget request.

The Yellow Sheet had this to say today about some of that slush,

The governor wants to transfer surplus money from unspent federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families funds to Dept of Child Safety. Last year, lawmakers enacted a law that decreases the lifetime limit on TANF recipients from 24 months to 12 months. That law will go into effect this July. (Previously, the limit was decreased from 36 months to 24 months, and that move cut cash assistance caseload by 40 percent). Ducey is recommending moving $13.6 million in surplus TANF funds to DCS in FY16, and $11 million in FY17.

That, my friends, is a stark description of one aspect of the slush fund Congress gives our state.

Make no mistake, McDucey's budget and ongoing strategy to cut state taxes IS Class Warfare and a HUGE redistribution of wealth to the richest Arizonans, of whom, he is one. Ramifications of that redistribution include lack of resources to adequately protect abused and neglected children.

Scrooge McDucey is a con man and spouts full on Bullshit/propaganda. From The Confidence Game by Maria Konnikova, which the author of a BrainPickings article describes as,

... a thrilling psychological detective story investigating how con artists, the supreme masterminds of malevolent reality-manipulation, prey on our propensity for believing what we wish were true and how this illuminates the inner workings of trust and deception in our everyday lives.

In other words, the Arizona governor is a master of verbal legerdemain.

Challenge yourself to challenge the governor and the Republican-controlled Arizona Legislature to prove what they claim. A good place to start might be to get them to explain how and why all the tax cuts of the last two and a half decades have not caused a groundswell in new jobs.

Then demand accountability when they fail. And they will fail.