The leaders of the state Legislature indicated in a television interview broadcast Sunday that they might be willing to tax poor people's groceries to raise money for highways.
House Speaker Jeremy Gillam and Senate leader Jonathan Dismang wouldn't put it that way. It sounds harsh when you put it that way.
These legislative leaders discussed highway-funding needs on the Talk Business and Politics program on KATV, Channel 7, in Little Rock. They stressed that the most important thing was that any plan for additional highway money must be "revenue neutral."
"Revenue neutral" is a political euphemism for the money that grows on trees.
Rich power brokers like the Koch brothers' Americans for Prosperity and the even more unreasonable Conduit for Action threaten to oppose otherwise conservative Republican state legislators who concede to arithmetic. By that I mean the long-held principle that highways get paid for by taxes and fees on highway users, and that the way to fix the problem of declining highway revenue and neglected highway needs is to raise those highway-user taxes and fees.
That--payment for use--is how we finance electricity and water and natural gas. But now legislators are thinking about funding highways with taxes on the staff of life.
The current Republican state legislative majorities cower against the threat of opposition in the primary from Tea Party types who would be funded by these powerful and politically hyperactive rich people.
So among several money-on-trees notions under consideration, Gillam and Dismang said, is repealing Mike Beebe's law that would trigger an elimination of the remaining 1.5 percent sales tax on groceries.
You will recall that Beebe systematically drew down the state sales tax on groceries, pursuant to a campaign promise. He reduced the tax incrementally and only to the extent that he felt state government budgets could afford.
His final budget left in place the 1.5 percent sales tax on groceries, but provided by law for automatically eliminating that final increment when the state's annual $70 million special desegregation settlement payments to school districts in Pulaski County was ended. That is due to happen in the next year.
Now Gillam and Dismang are willing to consider repealing that law and letting the 1.5 percent grocery tax stay in effect, then diverting that money to highways.
Dismang described the tactic as simply failing to reduce a tax that is already being paid, and thus, he reckons, not a tax increase.
But I describe it as the repeal of a tax cut that is in the law, thus essentially a tax increase.
It's the equal application to the necessities of human subsistence that makes the sales tax on groceries inordinately burdensome on poor people, who don't require a party barge, but do require eating.
But taxing poor people's food doesn't seem to bother the aforementioned conservative political advocacy groups. They are more interested in flexing their moneyed muscle to stop any new taxes that might inconvenience non-poor people.
Am I engaging in class warfare here? No. I'm merely describing the existing war that has been declared by conservative advocacy groups on the poor.
Republican legislators do not fear political repercussions from poor people, who generally are not politically hyperactive or savvy. Poor people are certainly not possessed of millions of dollars to spend on political activity that would gin up and underwrite opponents to re-election campaigns.
Contemporary conservative thinking about the poor is two-pronged. One prong holds that poverty is the poor's own fault. The other is that the way to give the poor a chance out of poverty is to keep rich people's taxes low so that they would hire more people.
Any idea to generate additional highway money without raising highway-user fees hinges on robbing--for the first time--the state general fund, which is made up of collections of general taxes on sales and income and pays for schools, colleges, prisons, public safety and human services.
The road-building industry has proposed raising the diesel tax and then phasing down that increase by phasing in the transfer of sales-tax revenue from the sales of new cars. That's simply a two-step process of shifting some of the highway-funding burden from highway users to general taxpayers.
Another idea is to raise the diesel tax and offset that amount--to achieve "revenue neutrality"--by letting the grocery tax expire as planned. That's better, though one tax has nothing logically to do with the other.
The right solution is simple: Add at the pump a specific motor-fuel sales tax, one applied on top of the current per-gallon tax. That would make our gasoline and diesel tax collections variable, or elastic, based smartly on both volume and price.
But that won't work in the current political climate. That's because it's not money from trees, but arithmetic.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 11/03/2015