Kentucky has been operating on unsound budgets -- and filling in the gaps with borrowed money -- for several years. Now the tactic seems to have come to a head. The state approaches the midpoint of the fiscal year with revenues that are higher than ever before, but it still isn't enough.
Gov. Steve Beshear and House Majority leaders have been spinning like crazy in favor of a cigarette tax increase to save the state. The state's two biggest newspapers have played along as dependably as ever.
It's a bit of a surprise, though, to see the newspaper of a conservative county like Jessamine getting in on the act.
Falling for the idea that propping up Frankfort's overspending ways and maintaining current funding levels "for the children" with just one little old tax increase merely continues the practice of sacrificing fiscal sanity to political expedience. If voters fall for this, their children will pay for it.
Friday, December 26, 2008
Cutting off your child's nose to spite his face
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The Governor and the Kentucky General Assembly (KGA) refuse to acknowledge their own self-imposed mismanagement of public funds.
Spending $270 million a year to incarcerate marijuana users is a payoff to the private prison industry.
If hemp were legalized, there would be no serious drug problem in the US. Marijuana can be taxed and regulated just like alcohol and tobacco. That would end any abuse of it.
The amount of cocaine, crack, heroin and methamphetamine use involves but a small percentage of the population. There would be no overcrowding of prisons were hemp legalized.
The whole war on drugs is directed primarily at hemp.
The news media, when making a drug report, shows a picture of a hemp plant leaf––as though that represents "marijuana," and therefore, all drugs.
The greatest abuses of drugs are the legal ones: alcohol and tobacco.
In Alexander Hamilton's 1791 report to Congress on manufactures, he said of hemp:
"This is an article of importance enough to warrant the employment of extraordinary means in its favor."
So why aren't you, the Governor and the KGA badgering the hell out of Kentucky's federal delegation to introduce legislation to remove all things hemp from the Controlled Substances Act, and put it under the Department of Agriculture where it belongs?
And why isn't the media urging "the employment of extraordinary means in its [hemp's legalization] favor"?
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