From the local paper where my Dad lives where I am today:

Boos to the state of New York for once again quietly raising taxes behind the scenes. This time it is at the Department of Motor Vehicles where standard eight-year driving license fees are going up from $50 to $64 and businesses with fleets of vehicles, such as cab companies and the local Stewarts shops, are seeing registration fees increased from $3 to $52 per vehicle. It is this type of behind-the-scenes taxes that often hurt the most.

This is one of my posting themes this year, concerns about how the headwinds from state and local governments fee and tax increases and fiscal problems are hampering the attempt to begin a recovery from what is being called The Great Recession–KSH.

State government finances are a wreck. The drop in tax receipts is the worst in a half century. Fewer than 10 states ended the last fiscal year with significant reserves, and three-fourths have deficits exceeding 10% of their budgets. Only an emergency infusion of printed federal funny money is keeping most state boats afloat right now.

Most governors I’ve talked to are so busy bailing that they haven’t checked the long-range forecast. What the radar tells me is that we ain’t seen nothin’ yet. What we are being hit by isn’t a tropical storm that will come and go, with sunshine soon to follow. It’s much more likely that we’re facing a near permanent reduction in state tax revenues that will require us to reduce the size and scope of our state governments. And the time to prepare for this new reality is already at hand.

The coming state government reset will be particularly wrenching after the happy binge that preceded this recession. During the last decade, states increased their spending by an average of 6% per year, gusting to 8% during 2007-08. Much of the government institutions built up in those years will now have to be dismantled.

Read it all.

It was just five months ago that Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. made the New Flyer bus factory here a symbol of the stimulus. With several cabinet secretaries in tow, he held a town-hall-style meeting at the factory, where he praised the company as “an example of the future” and said that it stood to get more orders for its hybrid electric buses thanks to the $8.4 billion that the stimulus law devotes to mass transit.

But last month, the company that administration officials had pictured as a stimulus success story began laying off 320 people, or 13 percent of its work force, having discovered how cutbacks at the state level can dampen the boost provided by the federal stimulus money. The Chicago Transit Authority did use some of its stimulus money to buy 58 new hybrid buses from New Flyer. But Chicago had to shelve plans to order another 140 buses from them after the state money that it had hoped to use to pay for them failed to materialize. The delayed order scrambled New Flyer’s production schedule for the rest of the year, and led to the layoffs.

One of those laid off was David Wahl, 52, who had worked there for a decade and who sat behind the vice president at the town-hall-style meeting, soaking up the optimism of the moment. “With mass transit being pushed so hard,” Mr. Wahl recalled, “I figured I’d be able to work until I was 75.”

Read it all.

“In a normal year, we might see 60,000 additional members,” says Tony Rodgers, director of the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System (AHCCCS), the state’s Medicaid agency. “We’re probably going to see close to 300,000 additional members by the end of the year.”

The discussion in Washington over health care includes an expansion of Medicaid, but Arizona is having trouble paying for the program at its current level.

“This is kind of a financial tsunami for us,” says Rodgers. “And we’re just trying to hold onto any log that’s rolling along, and trying to save ourselves until the wave stops.”

Read it all.

Some felons who have earned early release from prison are getting a few months of subsidized rent from Washington taxpayers, a new cost-cutting move expected to save the state $1.5 million by reducing the prison population.

The voucher program was approved earlier this year by the state Legislature, which needed to fix a roughly $9 billion state budget deficit. Before the program was in place, some inmates who had earned early release still couldn’t be let out of prison because they had no place to live.

By paying rent directly to an early-release felon’s landlord, the state avoids the higher costs of keeping those convicts behind bars. Inmates released under the voucher program are eligible for rent subsidies of up to $500 a month for three months – thousands of dollars less than the state would spend caring for them behind bars.

Read it all.

Gov. Mark Sanford always has been a loner, but on Saturday he didn’t have a friend in the House.

Not a single member of the House Republican Caucus spoke up for the embattled GOP governor in this oceanfront city at an organizational meeting that wrapped up with a 45-minute discussion about why Sanford should resign or be impeached.

House Speaker Bobby Harrell, a Charleston Republican, resisted calls from members to circulate a caucus letter to urge Sanford to step down or begin immediate impeachment action. Harrell said he wants the caucus to wait until a State Ethics Commission investigation is complete to ensure that impeachment proceedings would be based on fact.

The investigation began Aug. 10 and is expected to take between four and six weeks to complete.

Read it all.

Calls are growing louder for Gov. Mark Sanford to resign over his extramarital affair and questionable travel on commercial, state and private planes.

Those who were on the fence are now calling for his resignation, and those who were demanding his resignation now say he should be impeached.

Even a leader of Sanford’s own Republican Party said the governor may soon find himself alone in thinking he should stay in office.

Read it all from the front page of the local paper.

While Californians are still feeling the sting of income and sales tax hikes signed into law earlier this year, now comes news that state tax authorities plan to take a little more from their pockets.

For only the second time in 30 years, the tax board is lowering the point where each tax bracket begins, bumping many people into a higher category. At the same time, officials are cutting back some deductions. Everyone will pay more, even people whose bracket or income doesn’t change.

The extra sums will total as much as $140 per family, on top of the increases previously enacted.

Read or listen to it all.

In the glare of intense media scrutiny, a call by the lieutentant governor to resign and pending impeachment talks by House Republicans, Gov. Mark Sanford delivered a message Wednesday to reporters and his political enemies: back off.

While everyday South Carolinians have moved on since he admitted to an extramarital affair about two months ago, the governor said, the media are trying to rewrite history and his political enemies are scavenging for payback ammunition.

Sanford said that if his record is stacked against the records of past governors and other politicians, he’ll come out looking “incredibly good.”

Read it all.

But in the past two months, Sanford has been out of state for 25 days, more than half of which was spent in Europe trying to reconcile with his wife and children.

That’s fine to those who view the time off as coming during the dog days of summer, a time Sanford could spend best as a father and a husband first.

For others, the time away while the state is suffering doesn’t sit well, especially as more than 11 percent of workers in South Carolina can’t find jobs.

To be sure, Sanford is in lame-duck territory, no different than any term-limited politician at the end of his tenure. Sanford, a Republican, has a little more than 16 months remaining in office, and his recent troubles only make it harder for him to make the policy and taxation changes he seeks.

But Rep. Todd Rutherford, a Columbia Democrat who has called for Sanford to resign, said for the governor to prove that he should remain in office is “looking rather daunting.”

Read it all.

The State Supreme Court upheld the ban in May, but the timing of the federal case has some advocates for same-sex marriage arguing that a failure there could damage their efforts to persuade voters to reject the proposition.

Such views have discouraged longtime gay activists, who have watched several states legalize same-sex marriage recently.

“The troops, such as they are, are more disunited than ever and battling each other to the next failure,” said Larry Kramer, the playwright and a founder of the group Act Up, which led the fight for AIDS research. “They cannot agree on anything now.”

Officials with Equality California and the Courage Campaign said that was untrue.

“We’re all in this for the same thing,” Mr. Jacobs said. “I don’t see why this should put us at cross-purposes.”

Read it all.

States are aggressively expanding legalized gambling, eager to shore up battered revenue sources during the economic crisis and concerned that residents will cross state lines to gamble elsewhere if they don’t.

Gambling will expand in about a dozen states this year in an effort to generate an extra $2 billion in gambling taxes by 2010, a record-breaking increase if state projections are accurate.

“Politicians are pushed toward gambling when times get tough,” says William Thompson, a public administration professor at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. “If it’s gambling or a tax increase, the political choice is clear, and the public acquiesces.”

Very sad–since the poorest are most often the most hurt. Read it all.

In the year 1849 I was stationed at Baton Rouge, and married Miss Frank E. Stuart, whose honored sons and one living daughter now rise up and call her blessed.

Passing over several years in which I was engaged as the pioneer of temperance and prohibition work, I found myself the pastor at Macon, Miss[issippi], during the war, where a singular episode occurred.

The Mississippi Legislature, driven out of Jackson by the Federal army, took refuge at Macon. In the course of legislation, a bill putting all ministers in the State up to sixty years of age in the army, and favored by Governor Clarke, passed to its third reading, before the final vote was taken. Hon. Locke Houston, speaker of the House of Representatives, invited me to open the session with prayer.

In the course of the prayer I invoked the Divine Father: “Have compassion on the members of the Mississippi Legislature, who, without the fear of God before their eyes, have laid violent hands upon the ordained ministry of Thy church, placing carnal weapons in their hands, bidding them to go forth to war as instruments of wrath and blood, instead of messengers of love and peace.”

“O Lord, for this wicked act, which stands out in all its gloomy isolation without any parallel among the civilized nations of the earth, we invoke pardoning mercy.”

“O Lord, let not this vile act of legislation fall in dire disaster upon the lives of our people.”

Continuing in this strain of thought, and holding them up before the great Jehovah of all worlds, was somewhat startling in its nature.

Their indictment before the august Chancery Court of Heaven was something unexpected, and greatly surprised them; and when the final vote was taken they reversed their previous action and struck out of the bill all ministers engaged in their regular work.

This prayer, and its results, invoked the wrath of the governor, and much of the secular press.

–The Rev. John W. Harmon, Select Sermons (Paulding, Mississippi, 1894), pp.2-3. The author is my great great grandfather (!)–KSH.

It is hardly unusual these days for a government building to forgo a fresh paint job or regular lawn care to cut costs. But last week, the director of the Jefferson County public nursing home was told that the county could no longer afford to bury indigent patients.

Across town at the juvenile detention center, the man in charge was trying to figure out how to feed the 28 children in his custody when the entire cafeteria staff is let go. The tax collector warned local school districts to expect a six-month delay to get their share of property taxes. In family court, administrators plan to delay child support, custody and child abuse cases, leaving some children in the hands of the state indefinitely.

In every part of Jefferson County ”” Alabama’s most populous county and its main economic engine ”” government managers have been scrambling to prepare for Saturday, when two-thirds of county employees eligible for layoffs ”” up to 1,400 ”” will be lost in an effort to stave off financial ruin.

“Outside of the city of Detroit,” said Robert A. Kurrter, a managing director with Moody’s Investors Service, “it’s fair to say we haven’t seen any place in America with the severity of problems that they’re experiencing in Jefferson County.” Moody’s rates Jefferson County’s credit lower than any other municipality in the country.

Read it all.

Marc Solomon, marriage director for Equality California, said he spent June and early July asking the opinions of nearly two dozen California political consultants and pollsters and had been surprised by the almost unanimous opinion that a 2010 race was a bad idea.

“I expected having watched the protests and the real pain that the L.G.B.T. community had experienced that there would be some real measurable remorse in the electorate,” Mr. Solomon said, referring to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. “But if you look at the poll numbers since November, they really haven’t moved at all.”

A major factor in any California balloting, of course, is money; campaigns here are remarkably expensive, with a number of costly media markets. The Proposition 8 campaign, for example, cost more than $80 million, with opponents spending some $43 million.

Read it all.

The bribes went down in diners, living rooms and parking lots. New Jersey Assemblymen took them, mayors took them, and so did dozens of others.

Orthodox rabbis, acting more like crime bosses than religious leaders, laundered millions through synagogues and yeshivas in Deal, one of the state’s wealthiest towns. And a Realtor tried to sell an informant a black market kidney for $160,000.

Those were some of the allegations federal prosecutors made today in what could prove to be the biggest New Jersey scandal of them all.

The revelations came after hundreds of federal agents swept across the state, arresting public servants and religious leaders as part of a two-year investigation into corruption and international money-laundering that authorities described as unprecedented – even in a state known for its scandals.

The state in which I grew up. I wish I could say I am surprised but I am not. This makes the heart very sad. Read it all.

The political deadlock in New York’s legislature has been resolved. For the last month, the state Senate in Albany has been unable to pass bills or even meet. Republicans and Democrats were bickering over who was in charge. On Thursday, a renegade Democrat rejoined his party and returned control of the Senate to Democrats.

I caught this this morning on the way to an appointment. The summary of what has occurred is mind boggling. Locked doors. Sneaking keys. Bringing more than one gavel. Screaming matches. My goodness

Listen to it all.

Massachusetts, the first state to legalize gay marriage, sued the U.S. government Wednesday over a federal law that defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman.

The federal Defense of Marriage Act interferes with the right of Massachusetts to define and regulate marriage as it sees fit, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley said. The 1996 law denies federal recognition of gay marriage and gives states the right to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states.

Read it all.

Kendall Harmon, canon theologian for the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina, said it’s “part of our duty as Christians” to forgive Sanford. But it will be a particularly difficult process for those who saw him as a presidential hopeful, he said.

“I feel like there was a lot of hope in him, so I think the disillusionment is that much greater,” he said.

But people should reserve judgment, because there “but for the grace of God go all the rest of us,” Harmon said.

“The story of David and Bathsheba is in the Bible for a reason,” he said, a reference to the story of an adulterous relationship between the king of Israel and the wife of a soldier. “People’s naivety about their vulnerability to these kinds of problems boggles my mind.”

Read the whole thing

Read it all.

The most important things we have to deal with are the same things we had to deal with before Mr. Sanford traipsed off to Argentina. And we must not allow Mr. Sanford’s troubles to distract us from those tasks.

It is entirely unclear at this point whether the governor will be able to play any sort of positive role in strengthening our economy. But that’s nothing new. Legislators have complained all year (some much longer) that he has done nothing to create or keep jobs in our state, and that the incessant efforts by his allies to badmouth our schools, combined with his own extremist approach to federal stimulus funding, have actually driven off economic development. And whatever hope there had been that the governor and the Legislature might work together on this or any other front in the coming year evaporated with Mr. Sanford’s petulant stance on the stimulus funds.

Read it all.

Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska announced Thursday that she would step down by the end of the month and not seek a second term as governor, allowing her to seek the Republican nomination for president in 2012.

Read it all.

The last time Indiana missed its deadline for passing a budget and had to shut down the government was during the Civil War.

But on Monday, as lawmakers raced to hammer out an agreement over school funding, state agencies began preparing 31,000 workers to be temporarily out of a job. Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels has warned residents that most of the state’s services — including its parks, the Bureau of Motor Vehicles and state-regulated casinos — would be shuttered unless a budget is passed today.

Indiana is one of five states — along with Arizona, California, Mississippi and Pennsylvania — bracing for possible shutdowns this week as time runs out for lawmakers to close billion-dollar gaps in their fiscal 2010 budgets.

Read it all.

President Obama has bet the economy on his program to grow the government and finance it with a more progressive tax system. It’s hard to miss the irony that he’s pitching this change in Washington even as the same governance model is imploding in three of the largest American states where it has been dominant for years — California, New Jersey and New York.

A decade ago all three states were among America’s most prosperous. California was the unrivaled technology center of the globe. New York was its financial capital. New Jersey is the third wealthiest state in the nation after Connecticut and Massachusetts. All three are now suffering from devastating budget deficits as the bills for years of tax-and-spend governance come due.

Read it all.

Amid a whirlwind of public criticism, a good dose of humility and lots of soul-searching over his affair with an Argentine woman, Gov. Mark Sanford on Monday said that one of the key reasons he has decided to stay in office is to avoid influencing the 2010 gubernatorial primary.

If Sanford would step down, Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer would become South Carolina’s 116th chief executive. Many see that as giving Bauer a leg up over other Republican candidates in next spring’s gubernatorial primary.

Bauer would have the spotlight, and the 18 months left in Sanford’s second term for a trial run to win over voters. That possibility has political insiders angling behind the scenes and dictating, in part, how Sanford’s fall from grace plays out.

Read it all.

Some Republican state lawmakers are privately saying they want Republican Gov. Mark Sanford to step down ”” of his own volition ”” this week.

Meanwhile, Sanford has spent portions of the last few days phoning key lawmakers and Republican Party activists, apologizing for his affair with an Argentinian woman that left him out of touch with his staff and other state leaders for the better part of a week.

On another note, a source close to Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer said Sunday that Bauer has approached members of the Senate to discuss the possibility that, if Sanford resigns, Bauer would only serve the remainder of the governor’s term, focusing on job creation, and would not run for governor in 2010 as Bauer had originally intended.

Read it all.

“It started on a very casual basis — run things by each other,” he said.
He felt as if he had found a confidant.
“When you live in the zone of politics, you can’t ever let your guard down. You can’t ever say, ‘What do you think, what do you think?’ There was this zone of protectiveness. She lived thousands of miles away, and I was up here, and you could throw an idea out and vise versa.
“We developed a remarkable friendship over those eight years. About a year ago, it sparked into something more than that.”

—South Carolina’s Governor this week in his explanation of the affair.This was also quoted in this morning’s sermon by yours truly–KSH.

South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford considered resigning from office after his extramarital affair came to light, the Republican revealed Sunday in an exclusive interview with The Associated Press.

But Sanford, who hasn’t spoken publicly since Friday, said he spoke with close spiritual and political associates who advised him to fight to restore the public’s ”” and his family’s ”” trust in him.

“Resigning would be the easiest thing to do,” he said.

Read it all.

The Fuzzy math behind the Massachusetts universal healthcare law is starting to add up – just as Washington studies the law as a possible model for the nation.

Because of a recession-related drop in state revenues and a surge in enrollment by the recently unemployed, the truth is emerging at an inconvenient time. Massachusetts doesn’t have enough money to pay for the coverage envisioned by the law.

In June, state officials announced they are cutting $100 million from Commonwealth Care, which subsidizes premiums for needy residents. The poorest residents, along with the newest – legal immigrants – will take the hit.

This outcome is not surprising, but it is instructive as President Obama pushes for a national healthcare plan.

Last of the True Believers?

By risking his popularity now, Mark Sanford may be quite popular in 2012

–From the April 25, 2009 Newsweek (article entitled Mark Sanford: Last Conservative Standing?)