That pesky cipherin'

There has been a little confusion on the fringe right at the state Legislature on the question of whether we are raising or cutting taxes.

John Brummett is blogging daily online.

It gets hard. Ciphering, that is.

You've got naught multiplied by naught, and that equals naught. Then you put down naught below the line and carry the other naught over there, and whatnaught. Then you're supposed to put a decimal point in there somewhere.

Pretty soon you just need to go to bed with a headache.

I mean, seriously: If you are currently embarking on a new law to exempt 50 percent of capital gains from taxation and to lower the highest tax rate applied after that, and then if you vote for a bill with an amended section to repeal that new law and exempt instead 30 percent of capital gains from taxation, and then ... well, you can get yourself all gummed up in your ciphering quicker than you can say you hate Barack Obama, which, of course, you do.

The only way to keep your head clear is neither to read the bill nor attempt any mathematics before co-sponsoring and voting for the bill.


That brings us to Tea Partier Linda Collins-Smith.

She is a Republican extremist senator from Pocahontas. She is part of a contingent of a half-dozen or so senators currently performing the magic trick of turning Jason Rapert into a relative centrist.

I hope what happened was that Collins-Smith got up Sunday morning and read her favorite columnist in the Democrat-Gazette. I hope she learned only then and there that she'd voted for a liberal tax policy at the state level identical in principle to what that no-account Obama had proposed at the federal level in his State of the Union address.

That was to increase rich folks' capital gains taxes to help keep government services going while providing a partial offset for the cost to the treasury of a new tax break for regular working folks.

Specifically, it was to repeal the new capital gains exemption passed in 2013, thus to generate $20 million.

The idea was to soften the eventual $100 million drain on the treasury of the middle-class tax cut championed by Asa Hutchinson, that RINO rascal of a governor who pulled this Obama-esque math trick.

By the way: RINO stands for Republican in Name Only, which is what Tea Party fringe people call Republicans who practice arithmetic.

Regardless of how Collins-Smith came to realize what she'd done, constituents can rest assured she ran fast to the state Capitol on Monday and tried to get back the bill she'd helped pass. She said she'd thought that capital gains stuff was just some little tinkering, not any real tax increase on any real person.

Let's explain: Excluding 30 percent of a capital gain from taxation is not as good a deal for the recipient of the gain as excluding 50 percent. Proposing to lessen the exclusion from the new 50 to the old 30 was how the state was finding $20 million.

That $20 million would inevitably come from ... well, you know, people who pay it. A couple of them might live up around Pocahontas. Who knows?

Sen. Jonathan Dismang of Searcy, president pro tem of the Senate, prevailed against Collins-Smith's effort to recall the bill. He explained that the measure was probably going to get changed in the House, with some of the exemption and maybe all of it put back, at which point it would be returned to the Senate with a new amendment anyway.

Dismang also said something else to a reporter. It was that Collins-Smith "had some good advice from colleagues about making sure that she's read the bills before she votes on them."

Perhaps Collins could have read the post on Twitter from Tea Party ally Mary Bentley, a freshman state representative from Perry County. Bentley posted late last week that we need to cut "Capitol Gaines."

I believe Capitol Gaines is a county sheriff somewhere. I can't begin to fathom why anyone would want to cut him.

To be clear: The tax issue is about capital, meaning money, not Capitol, meaning the building now infested by right-wing fringe artisans, and about gains, meaning additions to that money, sometimes called profit, not Gaines, a common last name.

And we don't want to cut capital gains. Capital gains are good, much better than capital losses. The argument is about how much to tax capital gains.

The underlying problem is that we elected a competent and pragmatic Republican governor to work with a newly Republican Legislature infested with several simplistic zealots.

There are persons close to Hutchinson pleading with me to stop writing about how competent and pragmatic he is. They say he can't long survive with his base amid such slander.

I cannot lie. Hutchinson appears to bear the burden of a few skills. I even think one of them is arithmetic.

------------v------------

John Brummett's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial on 01/29/2015

Upcoming Events