Vote "Yes" on Wyoming's Constitutional Amendment A

Constitutional Amendment A is an amendment to the WYOMING Constitution and does not change our U.S. Constitution. It is an amendment that was sponsored by our dear friend Senator Leslie Nutting (R-Cheyenne) in 2011. The goal was to make sure that Obamacare or future federal mandated healthcare programs cannot be implemented against the will of the people in Wyoming. The need for this Wyoming Amendment is quite clear when we are all being faced with Obamacare' s burdensome tax (or should I say penalties) when fully implemented. We hope we can count on your support of this amendment as well as your help in spreading the word of how important it is to vote YES on it.  

  

Click here to view the ballot language. 

In the event President Obama is re-elected, this amendment is the ONLY protection the citizens of Wyoming have against Obamacare!

However, the Wyoming Watchdogs  (not affiliated with WyWatch) is an organization who is spreading misinformation about this amendment, stating incorrectly that it creates new powers or new rights for the legislature to control healthcare in Wyoming. The Wyoming Legislature already has these powers with or without the ballot initiative known as Constitutional Amendment A.

Here is a part of the legislative record of Wyoming Watchdogs (again, no affiliation to WyWatch):

• They opposed the constitutional amendment to protect the sanctity of marriage.
• They opposed the sanctity of life bill nicknamed the ultrasound bill.
• They opposed a 2nd amendment rights bill ran by Wyoming Gun Owners Association.
• They opposed the Constitutional Amendment to defend you from Obamacare in its original form (not just in its amended form that passed the House and the Senate).
• They called Representative Bob Brechtel "dangerous to Wyoming" publicly.

The Wyoming Watchdogs claim to be conservative, but they have helped the progressive, liberal left with their efforts at the state legislature more than they have defended the sanctity of LIFE, MARRIAGE, and Constitutional FREEDOM. Can you trust them or anyone associated with them?

 

WyWatch has never been one to think that we are more intelligent than the average citizen. Our job, or mission as we see it, has been about analyzing legislation or documents and seeking out experts who can help us understand important nuances. When conflicts of interpretation come up, we work diligently to get these expert opinions to you, our members.

Because WyWatch has learned it is best to seek PROFESSIONAL and EXPERT opinions on issues concerning our state statutes and constitution we went to a Hillsdale College graduate attorney and a Harvard Law School graduate who worked for Home School Legal Defense Association, which resides on Patrick Henry College's campus. These two fine attorneys did an excellent job of reviewing the ballot initiative known as Constitutional Amendment A and we would be thrilled if you would take the time to read their analysis.

Click Here to view Steve Klein's comments from the Wyoming Liberty Group (the Hillsdale graduate).

Click Here to view Scott W. Somerville's comments who worked for HSLDA for years which is associated with Patrick Henry College.

However, I want to point out something to you. Steve Kline from the Wyoming Liberty Group took the arguments from a concerned patriot who did a side by side comparison of the original amendment vs. what actually passed both houses with overwhelming majorities, and refuted the side by side arguments. Steve's comments are in RED.

The other attorney, Scott W. Somerville, reviewed the ballot language and the enrolled act that passed both the house and the senate in 2011 and did a beautiful job of explaining the importance of passing Constitutional Amendment A.

We encourage you all to compare what you hear and what you read between now and November 6th with what these constitutional attorneys have written. We hope that the links to the two documents we provide above will solidify your trust in the legislative and lobbying process that WyWatch uses now and will continue to use in the future.

If you have any further questions we will be happy to discuss them with you or better yet, put you in touch with the experts who can answer them for you. We are not afraid to tell you that we depend heavily on alliances with experts across the country to make sure what we do is not only Biblical, but also Constitutional. We hope we have earned your trust enough to depend on us for that. 

Principal Replaces ‘God Bless The USA’ With Justin Bieber’s ‘Baby’

The principal, Kilmeade explained, banned “God Bless the USA” because she felt it was “too grown-up” for the young children to sing at their “moving up” ceremony, particularly a line about starting over with one’s children and wife.

A Hailstorm of Tax Hikes Heading for Wyoming

Wyoming Liberty Group  | By Sven Larson
June 14, 2012


On Thursday June 14, the Heritage Foundation releases its “Taxmageddon” report. Taxmageddon is a $494-billion tax increase waiting to hit the U.S. economy on January 1, 2013. Time is running out for Congress to prevent this disaster, but even if it does, the Wyoming economy could be hit by its own hailstorm of tax hikes.

The Wyoming Tribune Eagle reports (Wednesday June 13):

"An increase in the state’s fuel tax is on the table. Toll roads are not. On Tuesday a state legislative supercommittee reviewed ways to raise money for Wyoming highways. The group will develop a draft bill for state lawmakers to consider in 2013. The draft bill will include a proposal for a higher gasoline tax, based on the committee’s direction. The amount has not been determined. It will also include increases in motor vehicle registration and driver license and services fees. It will apply a sales tax to fuel, too."

A higher gasoline tax is nothing new. In October 2010 the Transportation Committee sponsored a bill that would phase in a ten-cent increase over three years. The idea was to take the state gasoline tax to 24 cents per gallon. Conservative estimates showed that the higher tax would cost drivers $35 million extra per year, though some estimates suggested higher numbers.

These proposals are not the only ones that will raise our taxes. The 2012 legislative session authorized counties to seek voter approval for a one-cent increase in sales taxes. At the end of the legislative session some legislators also speculated about a one-cent increase in the state sales tax.

It is not good for Wyoming that whenever our legislators talk about our economy, their conversation centers in on tax increases. This is not a good trend, especially since there is a risk that the state will face spending cuts up to $75 million.

When spending cuts are coupled with tax cuts they are good for the economy. When spending cuts are coupled with higher taxes, the opposite is true. This combination increases government’s drainage of resources from the economy. Government is a burden on the private sector already as it is; we don’t need to increase that burden by having government take more of our money and give even less back.

Even if at the end of the day there will be no spending cuts, higher taxes will be bad enough for the Wyoming economy. It is fair to assume that the gasoline tax increase would be somewhere in the neighborhood of the 2010 proposal, phased in over three years. Furthermore, let us also assume that all counties vote to raise the sales taxes by one percent. Lastly, we add a one-cent state sales tax increase and allow the higher total sales tax to cover gasoline as well.

A simulation using a so called CGE macroeconomic model of the Wyoming economy gives a rather disturbing picture of what these proposed tax increases would do to the Wyoming economy. The following numbers are for 2015 and compare to a scenario without any tax increases:

• There will be 6,800 fewer private-sector jobs;
• Private corporate investments will be $110 million lower;
• Wyoming families will have $458 million less in disposable income;
• Local governments will see a net loss of $28 million in tax revenue.

Depending on what type of spending cuts would be added to this, the net effect could be considerably worse.

There is no doubt that Wyoming needs better roads. However, massive tax increases is not the way to pay for them. A much better approach is to build closer ties between road usage and the cost of that usage. A gasoline tax is an imprecise instrument in this respect: the gasoline tax affects all drivers, even those who do mostly local driving. At the same time, interstate drivers are increasingly able to get through the state without paying anything for using our highways. More and more passenger cars can, for example, travel the entire stretch of the I-80 through Wyoming without filling up even once, leaving Wyoming drivers with the entire bill for road maintenance.

The tax hikes currently being discussed will actually increase the incentives of out-of-state drivers to avoid a gas fill-up within our borders. This makes it even more surprising that our legislators are entirely unwilling to consider a tolling system or find cost reductions.

By talking tax increases and generic spending cuts, our elected officials are showing us that they are stuck in the same old conventional thinking about government’s role in the economy. Rather than trying to squeeze a fiscally obese government into an economy that is already too small to fit into, our lawmakers should reconsider what role government should actually play in our economy. A smaller, leaner government with fewer spending programs is more able to focus on such things as highway maintenance–and the net burden on taxpayers would go down in the bargain.

The road to a smaller, leaner government goes through principles-based, thoughtfully executed structural elimination of entitlement programs. That takes time, but Wyoming has the financial padding to take that time. Best of all, the payoff from concentrating government to non-redistributive functions are enormous for the state economy.

Death of Common Sense

The Gay Divorcees

There are more than you might think.
By Charles C. W. Cooke is an editorial associate for National Review

Announcing the results of his long-term “evolution” on the subject last week, President Obama revived the debate over gay marriage. In the widespread discussion, however, there is one question that’s rarely asked: How interested are gay couples in getting married?

Heretofore at least, the answer seems to be “not really.” Since 1997, when Hawaii became the first state in the union to allow reciprocal-beneficiary registration for same-sex couples, 19 states and the District of Columbia have granted some form of legal recognition to the relationships of same-sex couples. These variants include marriage, civil unions, domestic partnerships, and reciprocal-beneficiary relationships; and the most recent U.S. Census data reveal that, in the last 15 years, only 150,000 same-sex couples have elected to take advantage of them — equivalent to around one in five of the self-identified same-sex couples in the United States. This number does not appear to be low because of the fact that only a few states have allowed full “marriage”; indeed, in the first four years when gay marriage was an option in trailblazing Massachusetts, there were an average of only about 3,000 per year, and that number included many who came from out of state.

This dearth of early adopters is not peculiar to America. Research conducted in 2004 by Gunnar Anderson, a professor of demography at Sweden’s Stockholm University, seems to confirm the trend. Anderson looked at legal partnerships in both Norway and Sweden and found that in Norway, which legalized civil unions in 1993, only 1,300 homosexual couples registered in the first eight years, compared with 190,000 heterosexual marriages; in Sweden, between initial passage in 1995 and a review in 2002, 1,526 legal partnerships were registered, compared with 280,000 heterosexual marriages. In the Netherlands, gay marriage is actually declining in popularity: 2,500 gay couples married in 2001 — the year it was legalized — and that number dropped to 1,800 in 2002, 1,200 in 2004, and 1,100 in 2005. In 2009, the last year for which figures are available, less than 2 percent of marriages in the Netherlands were between same-sex couples.

Controlling for the ratio of homosexuals to heterosexuals does little to explain the enthusiasm gap. For rates to be similar, we would have to pretend that only 0.5 percent of the population of Sweden, 0.7 percent of the population of Norway, and less than 2 percent of the population of Holland is gay. In fact, the numbers tend closer to an average of 4 percent, which suggests that heterosexual couples are up to eight times more interested in registering their relationships than homosexual couples. It is, of course, possible that the estimated number of homosexuals is wrong, but, if anything, gay-rights groups tend to argue that the projected numbers are too low, and statistics show that the numbers of self-identified gay citizens are going up in every Western country.

Enthusiasm for marriage is somewhat lopsided by gender. Divorces, too. According to UCLA’s Williams Institute, two-thirds of legally recognized same-sex couples in the United States are lesbian. (Solely on the “marriage” front, in Massachusetts’s first four years, this statistic was 62 percent.) While data in the United States are clearly limited, Scandinavian countries have been at this a little longer. Denmark was the first country to introduce recognition of same-sex partnerships, coining the term “registered partnership” in 1989. Norway followed suit in 1993, and then Sweden in 1995. Again, Stockholm University’s study seems to confirm the American trend. In Norway, male same-sex marriages are 50 percent more likely to end in divorce than heterosexual marriages, and female same-sex marriages are an astonishing 167 percent more likely to be dissolved. In Sweden, the divorce risk for male-male partnerships is 50 percent higher than for heterosexual marriages, and the divorce risk for female partnerships is nearly double that for men. This should not be surprising: In the United States, women request approximately two-thirds of divorces in all forms of relationships — and have done so since the start of the 19th century — so it reasonably follows that relationships in which both partners are women are more likely to include someone who wishes to exit.

The debate over marriage does not necessarily hinge on its popularity among the eligible, and advocates of gay unions would no doubt assert that “equality” is not a numerical proposition as quickly as their opponents would aver that the very idea is a hopeless category mistake. But it is nonetheless worth noting that there is no particular groundswell — even in states and cities that have both legal gay marriage and significant numbers of homosexuals — and that, when gay couples do decide to get married, they are more likely than their straight equivalents to change their minds later.
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