District Drawing
If Tennessee Republicans win the General Election on November 2nd, they might consider embracing the radical idea that they can show themselves better than the party opposite by
creating more equal legislative districts:
As tempting as it may be to use the redistricting process to insure the destruction of the opposing political formation, let us propose the radical idea that House and Senate Republicans in Nashville should not have vengeance in mind when drawing the new electoral boundaries mandated by the census. If Republicans are indeed victorious at the State level on November 2nd, let them do the one thing the Democrats never would do when they were in control-draw the legislative boundaries in a fair and equitable way, avoiding gerrymandering as much as is possible. Most computer models show that equitable districts would still give the Republicans a majority in Tennessee, and likely a substantial one.
Labels: Conservatism, Democrats, Elections, Local politics, News Media, Political correctness, Republican Party, Tennessee politics
They Work for the Government...
Some State employees may be forgetting
who they are supposed to serve:
The Tennessee State Employees Association doesn't think that the humble and dignified sacrifices of their fellow citizens to help give the next generation of our people a good fiscal legacy should apply to them. The rest of us should keep paying ever higher sales and property taxes so that State employees, a group whose work benefits are often far better than many of their neighbors in the private sector, can get a higher raise in one year than many members of the general public have gotten in the last five years.
Labels: Conservatism, Duh, Elections, Local politics, Political correctness, Tennessee politics
Tennessee Tea
Many of the Tea Party's central themes have already been a
part of Tennessee's political discourse:
One of the Tea Party's most vocalized issues is over-taxation both at the State and federal level. While the Tennessee General Assembly can do very little but protest about oppressive taxation at the federal level, Tennessee has no income tax and is ranked 48th nationally in terms of tax burden. Our Legislature certainly has its fair share of problems with government waste-as chronicled amply in this space-but Tennessee has been blessed in that for the most part, the General Assembly has kept to its obligation to keep the budget balanced without resort to unconstitutional means of taxation.
Labels: Conservatism, Elections, News Media, Political correctness, Republican Party, Tennessee politics
Blue Book Politics
Is the Tennessee Blue Book
just obsolete?
Therein lies the rub where the Blue Book is concerned. In our own day an age, everything that can be found in its pages is now available online, and that includes the entire 2009-2010 Tennessee Blue Book, which is the latest edition. As long as there are significant numbers of people in Tennessee who do not have a way to access government information via the internet, the State will need to print copies of the Blue Book to make available. However, in the years ahead digital information will likely become even more widely available than it is now, and the State will likely find that it is cheaper to maintain the Blue Book online and digitize State Blue Book archives than it will be to print the book in large numbers.
Labels: Conservatism, Local politics, Miscellany, News Media, Political correctness, Tennessee politics
And the Tax Fairy Will Pay Off the National Debt...
Contrary to liberal belief, an income tax will
not solve Tennessee's problems:
The federal income taxes we pay don't seem to have solved the federal government's fiscal problems, indeed the national debt has increased exponentially since 1913 when the income tax was added to the Constitution. What's more, as federal tax revenues have increased, so has federal spending, which is now so high that no amount of taxes can reasonably pay for the federal government's leviathan. The income tax didn't solve the federal government's financial woes, but it seems to have further contributed to them because the government has come to rely too heavily upon it.
Labels: Conservatism, Democrats, Duh, Economy, Elections, Federal politics, Local politics, News Media, Political correctness, Republican Party, Tennessee politics
