Posted 9:41 PM by Creditwrench

Postings from Gov. Brad Henry's think tank.

It's known as the "edge" commission and is supposed to help the govenor find out what people think his admististration can do to help the economy. Charlie Meadows, well known Oklahoma Commentator starts the discussion


Charlie Meadows
Guest User


11/09/2003 17:16:30
It appears the EDGE is a continuation of, and or refinement of, the type of Central Planning - government/private sector partnerships that we have been doing for some time. This is more of an Eastern European style of economic philosophy rather than the free market approach as envisioned by our founding fathers.

In all the planning discussions, was there ever any serious thought given to reducing excessive government regulations, expensive startup fees, the elimination of franchise, corporate, capitol gains taxes and the reduction or elimination of personal income taxes as a means to lower the cost of production of goods and services in Oklahoma and thus make Oklahoma businesses more competative on a national and international level?

Creating an environment for entreperneurial sucess is fair and I believe more sucessful than the expensive central planning economic ideas proposed by the edge. If those ideas really produced more than their cost then we would no longer have to be continually increasing our efforts and raising the cost of government.

The real hinderence to taking the free market approach is the need to greatly decrease government spending. This would require reducing government waste and inefficiency but most importantly it will require eliminating spending for things government now does that are actually improper and immoral in a free market society, but are commmonly found in a socialist society. To eliminate these improper functions of government would cause a deafening squeal from the many little piglets who make their living or are subsidized off the government nipple.
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C. M. Woods
Guest User


11/09/2003 22:04:03
Right on -- Charlie Meadows! Your comments fit my thoughts to a T. It seems to me that each report from the so-called experts reflected the thoughts of special interest groups and contained very few suggestions for improving the economy in general.
Bill Bauer
Guest User


11/09/2003 23:09:42
They always need more and more money to fund their grandoise schemes. If they would simply take a good hard look at our court system they would find a way to save a ton of money.

Just stop and think about what goes on in our lower courts.

Collection agents and their attorneys flood our court system with demands for judgments against debtors. In the
final analysis, only about 20% of them will ever be collected on. That means that 80% of our court system's time spent on hearing such matters and rendering judgments upon them is totally and completely wasted.

That is an awful lot of money just being tossed down the drain all over the state.

Instead of worrying about the edges they ought to do something to stop such waste of tax payer's money and doing so would be extremely easy. All that would be needed would be a law that said that if a judgment had not been actively pursued by the plaintiff within 6 months the judgment would be come null and void and the
plaintiff would become ineligible to file another motion for summary judgment for one year in any court in the state of Oklahoma.

Enforcement of such a law would be extremely easy as well. It could be done by the county clerks. We have enough computing power to keep track of it and a simple
affidavit by the plaintiff showing what he had done to collect his judgments would be sufficient. If he lied on the affidavit let him spend a year doing supervised public service work on weekends and holidays thereby saving us even more tax dollars.

Doing something like that would make a whole lot more sense and do a whole lot more for our state budgets than some new do nothing edge commission.

Bill Bauer
Oklahoma City