Week in Review: Economy on the Rocks

$5 gas. Historically high inflation. Supply chain shortages. A stock market in freefall. A looming recession. A presidential administration that wants to keep taxing and spending trillions of dollars. Americans are fearing for their financial future, but there are ways that government can provide relief today without relying on Washington to do it. As renowned tax reformer Grover Norquist writes this week in The Arizona Republic, states can make sure Americans keep more of their hard-earned money by following Goldwater’s lead and cutting taxes.

Arizona, where Goldwater recently has enacted the nation’s lowest flat tax rate of 2.5 percent, is now “the frontrunner in the race towards lower income taxes,” says Norquist, President of Americans for Tax Reform and a Goldwater board member. Even as Washington lawmakers propose trillion-dollar tax hikes, the flat tax “will ensure Arizona remains attractive to jobs and opportunities, and, most importantly, provide a tax cut and a rate cut for all income taxpayers,” he adds.

“The flat income tax is a win for all Arizonans,” Norquist concludes. “It will allow small businesses to invest more resources in their employees and business operations, and will allow households to keep more of their hard-earned money at a time they are facing sky-high gas prices and the worst inflation in nearly four decades.”

Read the rest of the op-ed in The Arizona Republic. 

Patient Advocate: How Right to Try 2.0 Can Help Families Like Mine

“Would you be able to put your life on hold, raise hundreds of thousands of dollars in a matter of weeks, and move to another country for six months to save your own life, or the life of someone you love?” The Riley family of Arizona had no other choice after their infant daughter Keira was diagnosed with a rare brain disease, Keira’s mom, Kendra, writes in the Washington Examiner. Now, Kendra is urging lawmakers around the nation to follow Arizona’s lead in passing Goldwater’s Right to Try for Individualized Treatments (Right to Try 2.0) so that lifesaving personalized treatments aren’t out of reach for Americans with rare diseases.

“Unfortunately, the [U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s] system is decades old and not set up for new kinds of individualized treatments such as the one our daughter needed,” Kendra adds, before noting that Right to Try 2.0 empowers patients to “seek access to these promising cutting-edge treatments without having first to beg the federal government for permission.”

“This is the greatest country on Earth,” she says. “The nation’s laws should embrace its role in leading medical innovation and patient care when it comes to saving the lives of its own citizens.”

Read Kendra’s full op-ed in the Washington Examiner. 

VIDEO: Your School District Should Not Be Hiding Education From You

It ought to be a simple, uncontroversial concept: “Parents have an absolute right to know what their kids are learning in school,” according to Rhode Island mom Nicole Solas.

But as Nicole recounts in a new Daily Signal video, the public education establishment went to extreme lengths to keep her in the dark. “The National Education Association, the largest teachers union in America, did sue me for submitting public records requests about Critical Race Theory and gender theory in school—and these are the same public records requests that my school district told me to submit,” she explains.

Nicole stood up to the bullies with Goldwater’s help, but she’s far from the only parent to be stonewalled or worse just for seeking the truth. That’s why Nicole is strongly advocating for our policy solution: a landmark academic transparency reform—introduced in more than twenty states around the nation—that shines a light on what children are learning by requiring public schools to post their learning materials online. As Nicole put it: “Your school district should not be hiding education from you.”

You can watch Nicole’s Daily Signal video here, and you can find out more about Goldwater’s academic transparency reform here.