The HighGround campaign to raise Arizona's taxes

Last week, the public learned that Governor Jan Brewer’s unofficial adviser, political consultant Chuck Coughlin of HighGround, has put together a coalition of corporate-welfare interest groups (“Building a Better Arizona”) to fund a $225,000 campaign to buy radio, newspaper, e-mail, telephone and ground-mail advertisements, to try to fool the public into believing that your hard-working legislators are mean-spirited ideologues bent on passage of “draconian” budget cuts.

The truth is, most of the state legislators in the current majority are men and women who understand common sense, just like you do: When you’re out of money, you have to stop spending. When you’re deep in a hole, you have to stop digging.

The Sonoran Alliance blog has a copy of the HighGround media plan, as well as links to all of the supporters of the effort: http://sonoranalliance.com/?p=4337

It is unclear at this point whether the ads will even mention the gigantic tax increase Brewer and Coughlin are proposing--$1 billion a year for at least four years. But we know that the ads will NOT tell you about the billions of dollars that are WASTED every year by our state government, and by the bloated administrations at our local school districts.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Coughlin and HighGround, they are the people who led the campaigns in favor of the tax increase that brought light rail to Maricopa County (Prop 400 in 2004) and in favor of Gov. Janet Napolitano’s (failed) TIME initiative to raise the state sales tax.

The idea of raising your taxes is now supported by members of both of the major political parties. Representative Kyrsten Sinema (Democrat—Phoenix), who one of the most liberal legislators in the state, told the Arizona Guardian, “I’d like to give a special shout out to Chuck Coughlin and HighGround.” And in the “To” line in his memo to his “Team,” Coughlin included Arizona state Republican Party Chairman Randy Pullen, who has failed during the past two months to publicly condemn the Governor’s call for a tax increase.

Link to the HighGround memo:
http://www.americansforprosperity.org/053009-highground-memo

Let's STOP the corporate-welfare fixers who want to raise our taxes. Please invest in our efforts to defeat the Brewer-Coughlin tax hike.