AZ Prop 100 Passes!

I am amazed honestly, that Arizona voters approved Prop 100 by a 2 to 1 margin (link here). Faced with a state budget in the red by BILLIONS (one of the worst in the US), if Prop 100 had failed, thousands of cops, teachers, fire fighters, park rangers, prison workers, and other state staff would have been laid off.

The 1 cent sales tax (which is regressive, but, in desperate times, desperate measures are called for) will help to fund these essential state services. It doesn't mean there won't be further cut backs, they just won't be as severe.

Arizona has some of the nation's LOWEST property taxes ("keep yer guvmint hands off my prop-tee!"). When we moved here in 2007, and our home - which we bought at the time for 50% more than our previous South Carolina domicile now that we are 2 incomes with Dr Desert Flower done with grad school - the AZ property taxes were less than 1/2 of what we paid in SC. So 50% more house, for 1/2 the tax of the smaller, cheaper house. When the housing bubble burst, and housing prices (and assessments and resale values) plummeted, so did the already minuscule state revenues.

I really figured with so many passionate red state mind sets here, a vast retired population who no longer have kids in school, and the libertarian vein that runs through the West, that Prop 100 would have failed, by a narrow or a wide margin. I'm surprised, and delighted, that it passed, by 2 to 1. It gives me hope for the future.

It's still sad that 1/3 of Arizonian voters wanted to defeat it... but you know, 17% of Illinois voters voted for extremist Alan Keyes when he ran against Barack Obama, and 23% of US voters still were devoted to Bush at the end of his disastrous 8 years of idiocy. In a democracy, there will always be dissenting perspectives, and that's a good thing.