Matthew Falconer
Articles by Matthew Falconer
February 27, 2011
The drama unfolding this week in Wisconsin is a collision between the generous salary and pension benefits of government employees and the ability of the average taxpayer to afford them. The unions parade thousands of teachers, police and fireman who try to portray this battle as rich versus poor. B...
March 07, 2011
The chants to repeal Obama Care are being replaced with a chant to repeal Obama Rail in Florida. With the dramatic Supreme Court challenge against Rick Scott´s decision to reject Obama´s stimulus money for high speed rail, taxpayers are looking at the state law that approved high speed r...
March 10, 2011
The Florida Department of Transportation has plans to build government rail projects costing $64 billion in Florida, including the $2.5 billion Sun Rail project that will have just 3500 riders a day. Support for Sun Rail is diminishing as state budget cuts force taxpayers to prioritize which program...
March 14, 2011
Last week I debated Alan Grayson´s former chief of staff who said Republican´s are "waging a war on the middle class." Her class warfare rhetoric stems from the nationwide movement to reign in government benefits. The truth is the real war on the middle class is our ever expanding govern...
March 23, 2011
The events in the Middle East are challenging to understand and even more difficult to influence. Decades of oppressive rule by dictators has given rise to an uprising of the people. We all hope the revolution underway will lead to a peaceful democratic Middle East but we have no way of knowing the ...
March 19, 2011
Republican John Mica served as a member of the Florida House of Representatives from 1976 to 1980 and was elected to the United States Congress in 1992. I have met John Mica on a number of occasions and while Mica and his wife are kind and decent people his progressive spending policies are endanger...
April 01, 2011
Since the election of Barack Obama gas prices have doubled. This trend has stymied economic recovery as consumers put tens of billions of dollars into their gas tanks instead of our small business economy. Many blame the high prices on global events but the truth is our energy crisis is our own faul...
February 11, 2011
The truth is Orlando´s commuter rail is not about transportation. It is about "concurrency." Without commuter rail downtown Orlando is at or near capacity in terms of how many high rise buildings they can construct because roads are at capacity. Commuter rail will enable powerful special inter...
February 13, 2011
John Mica is once again pushing to "privatize" our toll roads in central Florida. But what John Mica fails to understand, and the public needs to know, is John Mica wants to "monetize" our toll roads.
Under Mica´s plan, the Expressway Authority will be sold to a private concern for $3-4 b...
January 23, 2011
WHAT IS SMART CAP
The "Smart Cap" is a proposed law in the State of Florida that limits or "caps" state and local government revenue and spending to the previous year plus an increase for inflation and population growth. The most recent bill can be found on the link below;
http://flsenate.go...
January 09, 2011
Our government "leaders" have the public relations machine working overtime to sell the Florida taxpayers on the benefits of high speed rail, helped by millions of dollars from foreign companies angling to build the rail system. But instead of real numbers our government has exaggerated the ridershi...
December 20, 2010
With the November elections in the books and a new more conservative Congress to be sworn in, the "tea party" movement has two paths it can follow; one is to stand behind big spending Republicans to help defeat big spending Democrats and the other is to support fiscally conservative Republicans defe...
December 12, 2010
As blizzards wreak havoc in the mid-west today, and cancel the NFL game for my beloved New York Giants, there is a "white out" of another kind, a political and economic blindness in our leaders and elected officials. And the blindness comes from both sides of the political aisle.
Republi...
December 16, 2010
As multi-national corporations spend millions to promote a high speed rail network in the United States, the public is being fed a steady stream of half truths and outright lies about the project. The biggest lie of course is the money for the project is coming from the Federal government.
We ca...
November 18, 2010
INTRODUCTION
This analysis of Florida´s rail initiatives is based on four years of study into the benefits and drawbacks of rail systems in Florida. Its goal is to give elected officials and taxpayers both sides of the rail argument so they can make informed decisions. Florida´s rail initiative m...
September 19, 2008
Chapter One Save Our Homes-The beginning of the end.
In 1992, Ken Wilkinson, a County Property Appraiser from Lee County, Florida, was successful in promoting and getting into law a bill known as "Save Our Homes." The law limited the increase in property taxes on "homestead property" to C...
August 26, 2008
From 2000 to 2006, Florida enjoyed one of the best economies the United States has ever seen. The Gross State Product increased from $471 billion to $713 billion with some periods exceeding an 8% increase in GSP annually. Unemployment dropped to 3.3%, wage growth was very strong, and small business ...