Goldwater Institute

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Arizona state government is in the midst of a $700 million budget crisis. Cities, counties, and school districts across the state are struggling to make ends meet. The federal government is drowning in record deficits and mounting debt. Some politicians are quick to blame declining revenues for government budgetary woes. Readers of the 2011 Arizona Piglet Book, however, will quickly see that too much spending, not too little tax revenue, is the real culprit.

This is the third in a series of reports by Goldwater Institute senior fellow Robert G. Natelson on the power of state legislatures to initiate the process for amending the U.S. Constitution under Article V. The previous two reports explain that the purpose of the Article V amendments convention is to provide a parallel process whereby the states effect constitutional amendments.

During the 1990s, New York City achieved stunning drops in crime from the “broken windows” community policing strategy adopted by Police Commissioner William Bratton. In two years, murder declined by 39 percent, robberies by about 33 percent and burglaries by 25 percent. New York’s approach completed the evolution of community policing from a reactive model into a proactive one, focusing on aggressive, effective crime-reduction that maintains order and holds police officers accountable. Aspects of this approach have been successfully adopted by a number of cities, including some in Arizona. Sustaining these gains requires embedding high-performance policing throughout a department to shield police agencies from the potentially corrupting influence of drug cartels - especially as the chaos in the border areas of Mexico threatens to spill over.

When Arizona’s current budget problems began in the spring of 2007, we had just come off of two years of unprecedented revenue and expenditure growth of 17 and 12 percent respectively. Since then, lawmakers have used a variety of tactics to manage the budget as state revenues dropped to levels last seen in 2004. These tactics have so far allowed Arizona to continue spending at near-record levels. Of $12.5 billion in solutions to budget shortfalls, $2.2 billion are said to have been in spending reductions.