Local opinion: No more of Doug Ducey, please

Syndicated columnist George Will wants Doug Ducey to run for president in 2028.

In May, Will wrote “an imagined announcement” that Arizona’s ex-governor would make as “a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.” Ducey was not consulted, Will said.

His proffered speech would have Ducey characterize himself as calm, not chaotic; legal, not illicit; consultative, not coercive; a capitalist, not a socialist; a small “r” republican, not an autocrat; barely noticeable, not bannered on buildings.

No longer a capital “R” Republican because he disdains the president, Will cottons up to Ducey as would-be savior of a nearly extinct, old-school GOP, favoring free markets, regardless of how much they boost inequality; championing individual rights over community responsibilities; fostering fiscal restraint even when people suffer. None of which is better than current White House policies.

Ducey’s chances are nil, except in Will’s fantasy. That may be why he avoids referring to the ex-governor’s two terms of regressive actions, including giving away huge sums to businesses and the well-off, inflicting a possibly mortal wound to public schools, disbelieving climate change and creating a border boondoggle.

Here’s a sampling of Ducey’s deals, most of which continue causing harm:

He said in his 2015 inaugural speech that government should run “at the speed of business,” which Arizona Republic columnist Robert Robb called “a nonsense claim ... a nonsense phrase.” Ducey’s speed involved impetuous decisions on economic development, deregulation and tax cuts.

He pushed legislators to pass multi-billion-dollar annual budgets, often after all-nighters that blurred common sense and the conscious. Ducey speedily signed them, not how good business operates.

In 2015, he proposed giving Apple Inc. a $35 million tax break for a Mesa data center, creating 700 jobs; a decade later, the center employs 150. The state ultimately gave Apple $1.3 million, still too much of a gift for what then was the world’s richest company, with $53.3 billion in annual profit.

In 2021, he signed a 2.5% flat income tax, promising the average resident a $300 annual tax break. People making $500,000 or more got $16,000 and up; 72% of Arizonans got less than $45, the Joint Legislative Budget Committee calculated. The wealthy got gold from Ducey’s flat-tax mine; everyone else got the shaft.

Ducey said lower taxes would create jobs. They did not; tax cuts rarely if ever do.

Additionally, the flat tax caused a $1.6 billion state deficit in 2024-25, forcing cuts in education, infrastructure and municipal revenues. Shortages of $2 billion or more will continue annually, the think tank Grand Canyon Institute estimated.

In 2022, Ducey approved universal vouchers for school choice, making $1 billion in payments a year to mostly wealthy families, while others send their kids to public schools being hollowed out by vouchers sucking money from them. The auditor general called vouchers highly susceptible to fraud, with up to $100 million in “high risk expenditure transactions.”

Onto climate change. Fires burned 800,000 drought-stricken acres in Arizona when Ducey was governor, while he parroted Republican science doubt dogma: “What I am skeptical about is what human activity has to do with it.”

His final act came in 2022 when, “at the speed of business,” he spent $200 million buying, installing and being ordered to remove 3,000 shipping containers in Cochise and Yuma counties in a failed scheme to seal the border. A judge ruled the political ploy illegal. “There’s no perfect solution,” the disingenuous Ducey said.

That’s whom George Will wants to be president. No, thank you, George. Arizonans have had enough of Doug Ducey.