Jeff Flake’s Conservative Conscience
Jeff Flake is the junior United States Senator from Arizona. He graduated from Brigham Young University with a degree in International Relations and spent time as a missionary in South Africa. Later he served as the Executive Director of the Goldwater Institute, a conservative think tank, and was elected to the House of Representatives six times beginning in 2000 before his run for the Senate. Flake is very conservative, believing that government’s involvement in the lives of individual citizens should be minimized and that strangling tax revenues and spending is the best way to ensure this. He is pro-life, opposed to gun control and voted against disaster relief spending for victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy. So one would not expect Jeff Flake to be openly critical of a Republican President whose election in 2016 made this conservative nirvana more likely. But Jeff Flake is a man of principle and he has unloaded on Donald Trump.
West Virginia’s Other Public Health Crisis
Now that President Trump has declared that the opioid epidemic in this country is a national disaster, we may soon see more attention being paid to that health crisis in West Virginia. But there's another health crisis in West Virginia that’s been festering under the radar: the epidemic of chronic disease and general poor health. According to the most recent report by the West Virginia Health Statistics Center, West Virginians have the second highest obesity rate in the country, the fifth highest rate of inactivity or lack of exercise, and the fifth highest rate of cancer. The state ranks first in the country for heart attacks, second for the prevalence of mental health problems and fourth for diabetes. Panhandle counties, particularly Jefferson, generally fare better than the rest of the state on these measures. Yet from any viewpoint, these statistics are troubling. But unlike with opioids, recent science has shown there’s a quick, inexpensive, and certain cure for this crisis of poor health: it is our feet.
Charlottesville
I have spent a lot of time in Charlottesville, first for college and then numerous visits later. It is a lovely city, home to a fine university that pursues reason in the Enlightenment tradition of its founder. So it was that yesterday, as I saw the still photographs of the violent demonstration by white supremacists and alt-right thugs in Charlottesville, I sobbed. How can this kind of thing happen in our country, much less in Charlottesville? Something has changed. That something is Donald Trump.
The Old Bait And Switch
West Virginia voters have just been made the victims of a fraud -- we were sold one thing by Jim Justice and he has now delivered another. It did not take him long to reveal the fraud, suggesting that it was intended from the beginning. On a stage with Donald Trump on August 3, 2017, Justice announced that he was switching parties from Democrat to Republican. Recall that this is a man who switched party affiliations from Republican to Democrat in 2015 so he could run for Governor on the Democrat ticket. He was elected in November 2016, a mere nine months before switching back again. In front of a cheering crowd who had booed him just moments before, Justice explained that "I just can't help you anymore being a Democrat governor." This bait and switch had far less to do with Justice's desire to be an effective governor than with his lack of character.
Moral Politics
Recently, the Charleston Gazette published an editorial that I have not been able to quit thinking about. The editorial was entitled Morality, Irony and the Fate of America. It pointed out that the current Republican agenda is to take healthcare away from 20 million Americans, 170,000 of them West Virginians, and direct that money to the rich in tax cuts. It noted further that the proposed Trump tax cuts would cut one-fourth of the SNAP benefits for low-income families, undermining nutrition for 100,000 West Virginians. All with the same result of benefitting the rich. And “various other programs that keep the wolves from the door, that give people breathing space to improve their own circumstances, are at risk in the ongoing conflict.” According to the Gazette, this is not just wrong as a matter of policy. It is immoral.
West Virginia’s High Stakes Stimulus Plan
The West Virginia Legislature has a single required duty when it meets each year -- pass a balanced budget. When the regular session began in early 2017, the revenue available for funding state programs had dropped to $4.05B, approximately $500M less than was spent in the previous fiscal year. Against this backdrop, Governor Justice proposed a number of new revenue sources and programs, few of which got any traction.
Being in no mood to raise new revenues, the Legislature was prepared to force the state to “live within its means” by drastically cutting programs and services. But on June 13, at the proverbial last minute, the Governor sent a letter to the Speaker of the House of Delegates with a revised revenue estimate of $4.225B. This higher revenue estimate enabled the Legislature finally to pass a budget without hyper-cuts to state programs. But the estimate was based on wishful thinking and may force the Legislature to confront an even larger deficit next fiscal year.