State government couldn't find $4.9 million in continued funding for community health centers, mainly because it cut taxes on the capital gains enjoyed by better-off people.
So now the governor will call the Legislature to special session late this month to authorize long-term taxpayer debt to subsidize giant defense contractor Lockheed Martin.
The state subsidy--our taxpayer contributions to principle and interest--will help Lockheed Martin lower the price of fancy new Humvee-style vehicles. Thus the company will better compete for a federal Defense Department contract to be paid by yet more of your taxpayer money.
Let me confess: I doubt I'd vote against this state debt--or, more precisely, the authority to issue it if the circumstances play out right--if I were in the Legislature. Who wants to oppose 600 jobs for Camden? Who wants to stand by and watch Lockheed Martin get the deal from ever-pliable Mississippi or Alabama?
But I do like irony and pointing out the hypocrisy in right-wing positioning and prioritizing.
My point is that we ought to become introspective about our bogus claim that we oppose big and active government and favor free and unfettered private markets. We need to realize and accept that we are kidding ourselves.
And we ought to consider re-prioritizing to invest in something other than jobs--not instead of jobs, and not as a higher priority than jobs, but an equal one.
We ought to apply moral and arithmetical balance to our mad dash to reduce taxes for rich people and subsidize giant companies.
A job is a good thing for a poor person. But so are broad services at a nearby medical clinic.
That is to say I'd probably give Lockheed the money--because ransoms must be paid sometimes--but that I'd give community health centers money, too, instead of cutting taxes the better-off pay when they sell something for a nice profit.
I'm told the Pentagon much prefers Lockheed Martin's Humvee-style product over competitors. But I'm told the Pentagon is concerned that the Lockheed Martin price is too much higher than others and needs to be brought down a bit before the federal government can justifiably buy the product.
So to bring down the cost of manufacturing the vehicles and protect its profit at a lower price, Lockheed Martin is almost apologetically asking Arkansas to exercise its authority under Amendment 82 to do as it did for that steel mill.
That is to authorize bonds--to be issued if this contract comes to fruition--to produce subsidizing cash that would get paid back over time from the state general fund. That's the same state general fund that didn't have $4.9 million for community health centers because it cut capital gains taxes by $6 million.
Perhaps I'm beginning to belabor that point, and the math, and the priority, and the hypocrisy. But those are worthy objects of belaboring.
So let's belabor some more: Last week state Sen. Jim Hendren of Sulphur Springs, Republican co-chairman of the task force that conceivably could do away with the successful private-option form of Medicaid expansion, dismissed my point in a television interview that all our health-insurance premiums are held down in Arkansas by the entry of a quarter-million people into the market through the use of federal funds for the private option.
He said that amounted to an "artificial" market and that an artificial market was not the American way and would not hold.
Well, then, the farm sector also is an artificial market. So is highway contracting. And so is defense contracting.
Arkansas is going to go for the Lockheed Martin deal because we'll get 600 new artificial jobs in Camden, perhaps to be filled by people coming off the artificial private-option form of Medicaid insurance in the artificial health-care market.
Artificial markets, I submit, amount to the real American way.
The health-care market has long been artificial in America, thank goodness. We have Medicare, Medicaid, Veterans Administration health care and the very community health centers that formerly got state funding.
And that's not to mention tax credits and deductions for health-insurance premiums and health-care costs.
Why would we even think of drawing a new artificial line in the sand now over buying health insurance for poor people in a program that is coming in under costs?
That makes as much sense as cutting a rich guy's capital gains taxes and recouping the money from community health centers in rural Arkansas.
But that's our priority, our hypocrisy and our faux conservative fantasy.
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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 05/17/2015