Another voter-ID law has been blocked. This time it was in Pennsylvania, where a state judge said the law could not go into effect before the November election. Opponents of the law had argued that it was deliberately aimed at disadvantaging minorities, and they cited a top GOP state lawmaker who boasted that the law “is going to allow Gov. Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.” Last month, a federal court panel struck down a voter-ID law in Texas, and a state court blocked Wisconsin’s law. South Carolina’s voter-ID law is still tied up in federal court.
Neither presidential candidate is being honest about the federal deficit and debt, columnist Robert Samuelson wrote. President Obama largely ignores the need for entitlement reform, instead implying that raising taxes on the rich will solve most of the problem. Though Mitt Romney is talking about the need to reform Medicare, his call for cutting taxes ignores the reality that the government can’t balance its budget through spending cuts alone. “What defines this campaign, in part,” Samuelson wrote, “is a yawning gap between the political rhetoric and the country’s budget problems.”
It was encouraging that state tax collections in September were $28 million more than expected. The August receipts had come in $14.9 million less than anticipated, putting the state in a budget hole even before Gov. Sam Brownback’s tax cuts kick in. The unemployment rate is also improving slightly. The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for August was 6.2 percent, down from 6.3 percent in July and 6.7 percent in August 2011. However, part of the unemployment improvement was due to a decline of about 5,000 people in the Kansas labor force (most of whom were older than 55).
Another voter-ID law has been blocked. This time it was in Pennsylvania, where a state judge said the law could not go into effect before the November election. Opponents of the law had argued that it was deliberately aimed at disadvantaging minorities, and they cited a top GOP state lawmaker who boasted that the law “is going to allow Gov. Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.” Last month, a federal court panel struck down a voter-ID law in Texas, and a state court blocked Wisconsin’s law. South Carolina’s voter-ID law is still tied up in federal court.
