After a Jan-Feb-March filled with constant debate, finger pointing, rancorous rhetoric, from the Governor and senior GOP House and Senate leadership, it was finally determined by all the collective "wisdom" of the Republican Party that the best way to solve the financial crisis facing Kentucky, and save the public pensions of all public workers, as well as save the Kentucky budget is to tax little old ladies and their cats as well as hard working blue collar auto mechanics, who often fix the autos of the poor and working poor!
Really? Seriously? This is the best we can do for the people of Kentucky? If this is the case, then what moral cowards we now have in Frankfort running the state's business.
Great men and women in the recent history of writing state budgets worked hard to seek the higher path of balancing taxation and securing more revenue for the state. Initiative Economic strategies, better use of state resources, sound moral leadership and the willingness to work under great pressure was their calling cards that kept state budgets on level basis.
Now, with the Republicans owning the Kentucky House of Representatives as well the Senate, political leadership became lost in shadows of sex charges, cronyism, and downright malfeasance of official duties.
In walks Steve Rudy, (R )1st House District representative.
Rudy is the Chairman of the House Appropriation and Revenue Committee and as such is the major leadership force in the House for writing a workable two year state budget.
Rudy represents the counties of Ballard, Carlisle, Hickman, Fulton and a part of McCracken. The Mississippi River borders four of these counties. The Ohio River flows along the northern border of McCracken.
Unfortunately for Kentucky, despite a thirteen year term of office Rudy lacks any real expertise at anything dealing with modern government. One must speculate that his choice as Chairman of the House A & R Committee was to make sure the GOP had an nonthreatening person in charge of writing the budget.
The GOP legislative leadership truly got what they wanted, an intellectual pawn in a serious game of killer class warfare chess. As of this late date, the state budget process stands in jeopardy where the Governor has threatened he may not sign it as well as the Senate making noise that they too have a problem with the final House A&R product.
he adaptation of an agenda that reads like the "call to arms against the working class of people who make up Kentucky day to day life," puts modern Kentucky future in jeopardy.
Not since the Committee for Kentucky in 1948 published their Kentucky on the March has there been a declaration of cause to tackle the states problems on such a scale. In 1948, Kentucky faced serious economic and educational depression. Hope was installed after a group of concerned citizens of Kentucky came together to change the arc of history for the state.
In 1948, Gordon R. Clapp, Chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority had this to say about the "Kentucky on the March " book. "It is a book to baffle the cynics, arouse the apathetic, and stir the practitioners in democracy to new heights of faith and achievement."
"It is also a powerful contribution in the war of ideas about how human beings can decide what they want, how to get it, and what they willing to pay for without loss of individual freedom."
With the span of history, Kentucky in many ways still resembles the gloom and loss economic hope that the state faced in 1948.
We should know better at how to work toward building a better future for Kentucky. Yet due to the likes of Steve Rudy, the ruling Republican House and Senate, we have a budget passed in locked rooms in the middle of the night darkness, away from the light of moral convection on serving the common people of Kentucky.
Rudy and gang have pronounced judgment on our futures and it is to support the special interest (13 billion dollars in special tax credits given in budget) over the needs of working class and retired citizens of Kentucky.
Steve Rudy's actions along with those of the Republican Party of Kentucky have proven they operate now without a moral compass as to the difference between the rich and the poor.
God help Kentucky! |
