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August 12, 2008
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From The Mailbag: Name That Oil Company
Posted by: Jonathon Prouty | 8:45pm | Permalink
This just in from a Missouri Pulse reader:
A quick point of reference on Jay Nixon's pathetic oil ad. Nixon put out a news release on 9/28/2005 that was the foundation for the P-D's 9/29/2005 story that he cites in the ad to bolster the claim he went after "oil companies" and levied "huge fines." According to Nixon's own release, the "oil companies", or convenience stores as he appropriately deemed them at the time, included that notorious oil baron "24-7 Minimart" of Doniphan, the dreaded "Jiffy Jim's" of Caruthersville and "Snak Atak," which I hear makes a mean slushy. And those "huge fines," well, they amounted to a whopping $6,750--Nixon's own words! Apparently, Nixon has to refer to Missouri's convenience stores as oil companies in order to prove his merit as Attorney General. Youd think that after nearly 15 years in the office, hed have a few actual accomplishments to speak of.
Here's the link to Nixons 9/28/2005 release:
http://ago.mo.gov/newsreleases/2005/092805.htm
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August 7, 2008
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Setting the Record Straight
Posted by: Jonathon Prouty | 12:15pm | Permalink
Recently, the Post-Dispatch lashed out at the conservative, no-new-taxes budgeting practices that have been one of the many highlights of Republican leadership in Jeff City over the past four years. Not surprisingly, the Post-Dispatch, which has long viewed state taxpayers as mere ATMs for big government, has refused to run Gov. Blunt’s rebuttal to the criticism, so, in the spirit of equity, here it is:
Insolvency to Surpluses: The Facts about Missouri’s Budget
By Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch recently stressed the importance of understanding the state budget. They should follow their own advice.
Missourians deserve to know the facts about the state budget.
The budget we inherited after years of liberal control in Jefferson City was an insolvent wreck, with a deficit of $1.1 billion. The budget my successor will receive is balanced, with a surplus. This is an established fact. Even liberal politicians acknowledge the surplus when they announce unsustainable plans to spend it on bigger government. It is regrettable that the newspaper is in denial about the dramatic improvement in Missouri’s budget.
In many states, the budget is in shambles. In Missouri the opposite is true. The National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) reported that 30 states face significant budget problems. Here, we are fiscally fit, with revenue growth, ongoing savings from management and program changes, no new taxes, and large increases in funding for education. NCSL reported that Missouri is among only 13 states with a stable or optimistic revenue outlook for 2009.
Our 2008 budget just posted the third consecutive surplus of my administration, with an ending cash balance of $833 million. As The Associated Press noted, this is Missouri’s strongest surplus in at least 20 years. Further, the rainy day fund for emergencies has grown from $463.3 million to $557.3 million since 2005.
Other newspapers have praised the responsible stewardship that rescued Missouri’s budget from insolvency. It is against the Post-Dispatch’s editorial beliefs that it is possible to balance the budget, increase education spending, provide medical care for those in genuine need, and meet the state’s other responsibilities, all without raising taxes. It is possible to do this. It is what our Administration just did.
In January 2005, I inherited a budget that included a $1.1 billion deficit. The budget had spending of nearly $7.13 billion, against revenues of only $6.98 billion, leaving us $148 million short in our operating budget. Additionally, the deficit included $790 million in mandatory spending that would have been necessary to sustain the old way of doing business and more than $68 million for other required payments. The deficit was not a list of suggestions as the Post-Dispatch asserted. For example, it included $460 million to pay for the growth of the old Medicaid system - a system attempting to provide public assistance to more than one out of every six Missourians and failing to even verify the eligibility for nearly a third of those who signed up.
On March 6, 2005, the newspaper presented its editorial remedy for the budget wreck. They suggested I propose a tax increase. We did not raise taxes. Instead, we cut taxes, three times. We made difficult decisions to control spending. We overhauled state government to produce savings and greater efficiency in the use of taxpayer dollars.
We reduced the number of state employees to below 60,000 for the first time in years. We proved wrong those who “knew” it was impossible to achieve financial stability without job-killing new taxes.
The editorial further misled readers about education by selecting 2001 as a funding baseline. Records will show I became Governor in 2005. The assertion that my administration increased elementary and secondary education by only 4.85 percent “more than in 2001” is extremely misleading. Working with the General Assembly we have increased K-12 funding by 17.2 percent or $440 million.
As with K-12, the editorial used 2001 data to mislead readers about higher education. Higher education funding in 2001 was $960.4 million. The next administration then cut this by $98 million, or 10.2 percent. My administration increased funding for colleges, universities and students by $166.5 million, or 19.3 percent, to more than $1 billion, the largest ever higher education budget and the first to exceed $1 billion.
This does not include the additional $335.3 million we provided to higher education through the Lewis and Clark Discovery Initiative. Thus, the total infusion of new funding for higher education during my term has been more than a half billion dollars.
The tax relief we provided to taxpayers was directed primarily to seniors, military veterans, health care and manufacturing jobs. But the editorial implied that these “lost” revenues would be reductions in future budgets. In fact, they are incorporated into our budget projections. The newspaper’s error has the effect of double-counting the impact of tax relief. I do not view a tax reduction as taking money “away from” the government, or as a “loss” to the government. Tax relief is returning taxpayer money to taxpayers. We need to do more of this, not less of it.
I hope that my successor shares my principles of good government. If Missouri follows the lead of liberals with radical proposals to dramatically increase welfare spending, the surplus might be sustainable for a few years, but this will eventually drive the state to either bankruptcy or a tax increase. If we continue on the path of fiscal responsibility, Missouri’s budget will remain strong and we will avoid the budget collapses that other states are experiencing because they failed to rein in spending.
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July 15, 2008
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Did The SEIU Get The Memo?
Posted by: Jon Prouty | 11:25am | Permalink
Why is the SEIU spending $450,000 on an ad buy to boost Jay Nixon’s campaign when everyone and their dog knows Nixon is cheap when it comes to selling out? At last check, Nixon’s going rate for a political sellout was roughly $20,000, which is based on the Ameren scandal and his acceptance of a $20,000 check sourced to his embattled political guru, who drubbed Nixon in a high-profile court case shortly after the donation was made. Apparently, the SEIU believes their objective, the reimplementation of ex-Gov. Holden’s collective bargaining order, is worth the $450,000.
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June 26, 2008
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Missouri’s Law Breaking Attorney General
Posted by: Jonathon Prouty | 10:00am | Permalink
 For the second time in less than a year, Attorney General Jay Nixon, the self-professed “top law enforcement official” in Missouri, has been caught breaking the law. Last year, he was caught misusing his taxpayer funded car and staff for political campaign events, and yesterday he was busted for illegally depositing a $630,000 settlement check into an office trust fund.
Nixon’s latest gaffe should teach his weary handlers an important lesson. Nixon is the MacGyver of political scandal. You can muzzle him, hogtie him, and even hide him from the public, but the fact is that he will always find a way to foil your best-laid plans.
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June 19, 2008
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Change Consumers Can Believe In
Posted by: John Hancock | 10:25am | Permalink
More and more folks are beginning to wonder if the Pelosites running Congress will ever get with the program and realize that record gas prices dictate swift action that may not necessarily gel with their hard-left energy policies. While ANWR has been an almost eternal sticking point between most Republicans and Democrats, a recent editorial in Investor’s Business Daily notes how leading federal- and state-level Republicans who once opposed offshore drilling are changing their views not for political purposes, but because the increasingly dire energy situation dictates it. Hopefully, Pelosi & Co. will soon wake up and realize that the outcry for relief from record gas prices trumps their window dressing policies, which have included taxing already beleaguered consumers and meaningless rhetorical condemnation of OPEC.
Excerpt from the Investor’s Business Daily editorial:
As we've said, Democrats are quite content to send half a trillion dollars annually to despots who are not always friendly. "In effect," McCain said Monday, "our petrodollars are underwriting tyranny, anti-Semitism, the brutal repression of women in the Middle East, and dictators and criminal syndicates in our own hemisphere." And that's the way the Democrats want to keep it.
Maybe we can't drill our way completely out of our energy dilemma, but we can get every drop of domestic oil we can. American oil for American cars, American factories and American jobs: The GOP wants to drill for it; the Democrats don't.
What a simple choice this November.
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June 16, 2008
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WILL & WILL NOT
Posted by: Jon Prouty |1:30pm | Permalink
Presumptive Democrat gubernatorial candidate Jay “Press Hound” Nixon WILL pose for photo-ops with sandbaggers working to prevent flooding along the Mississippi, but he WILL NOT lift a finger for 15 years to help Jefferson County homeowners who have been hammered by the flood of sludge emanating from the Nixon family sewage treatment plant. What a guy!
Ex. Nixon was nowhere to be found when Mary Koeller’s home and pocketbook took a serious hit as a result of pollution problems at the Nixon family sewage treatment plant. Mary Koeller, who lives in the Raintree Plantation subdivision near Hillsboro, says she's had some graphic evidence of the need for a better wastewater treatment system for that growing area. . . . She said that six inches of sewage had backed up recently into the basement of her home on East Vista Drive. "It cost over $7,000 to have the place cleaned up," she said. Compounding the problem was that insurance didn't cover all the costs, and it also will cost more than $20,000 to repair the finished part of the basement, Koeller said. Her story was one of the worst examples of problems that homeowners in Raintree related to officials of the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, who conducted the hearing at Jefferson College at Hillsboro. After hearing complaints about sewage discharges into the nearby Galligher Creek, troubles with sewage grinder pumps and the odor coming from the current treatment plant, DNR officials said they would take the comments under consideration and rule on the permit application in a timely manner. About 100 people attended the hearing. (Post-Dispatch, July 11, 2005)
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June 13, 2008
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Waste, Fraud & Abuse
Posted by: Jon Prouty | 10:20am | Permalink
When reform-minded political leaders speak of ridding the government’s burgeoning welfare programs of waste, fraud, and abuse, they are almost always shouted down by defensive, nanny-state Democrats (with the exception of TN Gov. Bredesen) and their liberal advocacy group allies, who consider such programs to be untouchable.
With that recurring exchange in mind, it remains to be seen how Congressional Democrats, particularly a certain ex-Missouri State Auditor/self-described watchdog, will react to the blockbuster story in today’s Washington Post that uncovered evidence of more than $60 billion of Medicare-related fraud per year. Apparently, defrauding the Medicare program is about as easy as stealing candy from a baby or, in this case, the taxpayers. A sacred cow it is not.
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June 9, 2008
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Hot Under The Collar
Posted by: Jonathon Prouty | 9:50am | Permalink
If Jay Nixon’s recent decision to succumb to Republican pressure concerning California’s gay marriage ruling did not sit well with his party’s liberal base, then Claire McCaskill’s decision to side with Kit Bond and other Senate Republicans in opposition to a massive climate change boondoggle, a top priority of liberals, must have put them in a Bobby Knight chair throwing frenzy. Now, what was it McCaskill said during her 2006 Senate campaign to reassure liberals about her views on climate change?
McCaskill’s red meat global warming rhetoric, KC Star, 7/21/2006: “Global warming is a threat that must be taken seriously as well. In Missouri, warmer average temperatures could increase heat-related deaths in the summer months and infection of insect-born diseases, such as West Nile Virus. It will also contribute to droughts and floods that lead to property damage. Over time, these higher temperatures are expected to alter the state's environment - changing the trees in our forests, the fish in our rivers and further reducing the state's vanishing wetlands. For Missouri's many hunters, fishermen and sportsmen, global warming threatens our way of life. The current Administration is still questioning the science of global warming. I believe we must seek innovative and responsible solutions to slow the rate of global warming before it's too late. A big part of addressing global warming is ensuring America's energy independence by investing in clean energy technologies and lessening our reliance on foreign oil.”
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June 3, 2008
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Mum’s The Word On SIF
Posted by: Jonathon Prouty | 12:40pm | Permalink
Despite all the sniping in the Democrat race to replace Attorney General Jay Nixon, none of the contenders have yet to breach the sensitive subject of the Second Injury Fund’s (SIF) looming insolvency, which has transpired on Nixon’s watch. What would Jeff Harris, Margaret Donnelly and Chris Koster do to rectify the SIF? Would they follow in Nixon’s footsteps and use the SIF as a de facto campaign depository for trial lawyer largesse while pretending to ignore its dire financial state, or would they exercise independence and seek to make it fiscally accountable to the small businesses that sustain it?
CHANNELING BILL WEBSTER? The word in the capital is that Nixon has accepted upwards of $250,000 in political donations from lawyers handling SIF claims since he raised the maximum settlement amount from $40,000 to $60,000 in 2001. Ironically, Nixon campaigned for Attorney General in 1992 on a platform that revolved around cleaning up the scandal plagued SIF.
Nixon: “As Attorney General, I will stop political abuses such as the Second Injury Fund scandal, where politically connected lawyers made millions at taxpayers’ expense.” (Lebanon Daily Record, October 26, 1992)
Nixon: “Right now, hundreds of thousands of tax dollars are lining the pockets of politically connected lawyers embroiled in the Second Injury Fund scandal. I will end the corruption and clean house.” (SE Missourian, October 23, 1992)
Nixon noted that he has promised to change the program [SIF] by barring any participating lawyers from contributing to the attorney general’s political campaigns. (P-D, October 22, 1992)
Nixon said he wants to change how the fund operates by barring lawyers from making campaign contributions to the Attorney General ... (AP, October 26, 1992)
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