While you’re down there at the Arizona State Capitol for Saturday's Tea Party, be sure to give Governor Jan Brewer a few rounds of “NO NEW TAXES!” If you cannot make it to the Capitol, please call the Governor at the phone numbers provided below.

Brewer has proved herself to be a one-woman fiscal policy catastrophe. For the last four months, she has held the state budget hostage in her bizarre quest to raise your state sales taxes by 18 percent. In doing so, she has wasted valuable time, during which Arizona’s state agencies could have been getting on with the tough work of rooting out waste and inefficiencies. Among the many twisted pieces of wreckage that Brewer has strewn in her path:

• Under parts of the legislative majority budget plan that Brewer has twice vetoed, state spending on K-12 education and other government programs would still be significantly higher than it was in 2002, in real terms (adjusted for state population growth and inflation). Indeed, under the majority budget, K-12 spending would have increased by an average of over six percent annually over the past decade.

• There was a three-percent difference between the legislative majority’s overall June budget of $9.8 billion and Brewer’s preferred budget of $10.1 billion. And yet, Brewer described the majority’s budget as “incorporating devastating cuts.”

• The budget that Brewer described as “incorporating devastating cuts” was a budget that she had actually agreed to the week before, in the hope that the Legislature would reciprocate by referring her sales tax hike to the ballot.

• Thanks to the hard work of many Republican legislators, the majority almost passed an income tax cut package that attempted to offset the damage of the Brewer sales tax increase. Brewer agreed to the package (that’s a good thing), even though it would have greatly reduced the total new revenue going to the state during the next two fiscal years. Which brings up an interesting question: If the Governor is hell-bent on raising sales taxes to bridge the deficit, why is she apparently willing to lose most of the new revenue to income tax cuts in FY 2011 and 2012?

• In her strange quest for a sales tax hike, Brewer has allowed a $250 million property tax increase to go into effect. A recession is a terrible time to raise taxes, and especially, to raise a property tax that will hurt manufacturing and smack homeowners struggling to stay in their houses.

• In her most recent veto message (September 4), Brewer admitted that her action “results in education funding levels that are not sustainable and additional reductions will be necessary.”

• Perhaps the silliest thing about Brewer’s obsession with raising taxes is that the money raised by her sales tax increase would come nowhere near to balancing the state budget. The Brewer Tax, if successful at the ballot, would still leave a structural deficit of well over two billion dollars. Because the state cannot hope to borrow that much (that’s a good thing), it will have to make big spending cuts--with the Brewer Tax or without the Brewer Tax.

It is important to get this story out to your friends and neighbors. The Arizona Republic, which some of your friends and neighbors still read, dedicated Sunday’s editorial page to attacking members of the Legislature for alleged incompetence and failure to compromise. At the same time, the editorial described Brewer as “inexperienced, but brassy” and “a tough negotiator,” saying that she “kept with her convictions” when she restored $300 million to K-12 education and the Department of Economic Security--even though the state doesn’t actually have that money available to spend.

If you cannot make it to the Tea Party this Saturday at the Arizona state capitol, please call Governor Brewer’s office at (602) 542-4331, (602) 542-1318, and (800) 253-0883, and tell her to stop playing games.

For more about Brewer’s budget games, read these recent columns by Republic columnist Bob Robb:
http://www.azcentral.com/members/Blog/RobertRobb/62338
http://www.azcentral.com/members/Blog/RobertRobb/57542

And for what it’s worth, Tribune blogger Le Templar explains that Brewer’s unbalancing of the legislative budget makes it unconstitutional:
http://whatiknow.freedomblogging.com/2009/09/08/state-budget-officially-violates-constitution/3743/