EJ Montini

opinion columnist

of July 1 it became official: Arizona is the most heartless state in America.

Thank you, Gov. Doug Ducey, along with the Republicans who control the Legislature.

You should be ashamed of yourselves, but I’d guess you’re actually proud to be No. 1 at something.

Even if it is cruelty to the poor.

As Arizona Republic legislative reporter Mary Jo Pitzl pointed out in an article early this month, Arizona is now “the most stringent state in the nation for aid to poor families raising children.”

This happens at a time when the state's $9.6 billion budget contained a big fat surplus and tax breaks were offered to businesses. As of July 1, however, Arizona is the only state to limit assistance under the Temporary Aid to Needy Families program to one year.

As a woman who runs a homeless shelter for such families told Pitzl, “Are you telling people you can only be extremely poor for one year of your life?”

Not exactly.

What the Legislature actually is telling such families – moms, dads and children – is: “We don’t care about you.”

Then again, we already knew that.

Arizona had been the only state without an active children's health-insurance program, having refused to revive KidsCare, a children's health-care program for low-income families.

It’s a federally funded program. For kids. Doesn’t cost the state a dime.

For the longest time former Senate President Andy Biggs refused to sign onto it. Ducey went along.

As Dana Wolfe Naimark, president and CEO of the Children's Action Alliance, said, "Senate President Biggs and a small minority of legislative leaders with an extremist agenda blocked a major proposal for children that had majority support in the House and across the state.”

Luckily, there was a movement at the last moment by good legislators, Democrats and Republicans, to revive the program. So there is health care for some needy kids. but still no temporary assistance for 2,500 or so poor people, about 1,500 of them children. What's next, pauper's prison? The cost of funding this would have been a drop in the budget’s $9.6 billion bucket.

This all comes at a time when the state is attempting to rebrand itself, a time when the Arizona Commerce Authority hired the branding consultant $250,000 to sell the state to those who might consider relocating here, particularly new businesses.

“We’re really not appropriately advertising ourself,” the governor’s spokesman Daniel Scarpinato told a reporter. “It’s going to be a new approach to how we market the state on all the platforms where we’re spending millions of dollars.”

None of it on our most needy brothers and sisters, apparently. Which gives us some bragging rights and a potential new slogan:

Arizona: Of all the pitiless, cold-hearted states in the land...we’re No. 1.