Gov. Asa Hutchinson took his second-term oath Tuesday and proceeded to share a vision of Arkansas that seemed to point north and west.
He apparently assumed that the south and east would be pulled along for the six-hour drive that is an interplanetary journey.
The governor spoke of Arkansas as if it were a singular and cohesive place. He saw it joyously primed to accelerate population growth and economic opportunity. He saw people streaming in from desolate places like California to pay our newly lowered top-bracket income taxes.
His version of the emerging Arkansas sounded like a statewide version of his native Benton County, which, while traffic-jammed and infrastructure-challenging, would be glorious just the same.
But Arkansas, packed on the map like a sardine between states as vastly different as bordering Mississippi on the southeast and the nearly bordering Kansas on the northwest, is two different places, at least.
To the north and west, it is generally doing well and is downright explosive in spots, culturally and politically akin to--or superior to--Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma.
To the south and east, it is racially divided and steadily abandoned, culturally akin to eastern Mississippi and northern Louisiana, with which it blends to form one of the nation's poorest regions.
Little Rock, the capital city in the center, is a near-perfect microcosm.
Here, then, is Asa's version of a singular Arkansas and its future: The population is growing and now north of 3 million. People are leaving higher-tax states. They will come here in greater numbers as we get our top income tax rate down to the point that it no longer is conspicuously the highest among our neighbors. More people paying lower taxes will create more jobs that will lift all our poor people, increasing government revenue over time to the point that we can spike our teachers' salaries and better educate our kids for the technological sophistication required by the modern world.
But here's a conflicting version: Most of that population growth is in two or three counties. People are coming to those locales for business opportunities arising not because of lower taxes but because of opportunities existing within the framework of existing taxes, which thus aren't a problem.
Other parts of the state, meantime, are rural and withering. Children innocently born in those sectors, trapped in a cycle of poverty and cultural deprivation, need more than computer coding in school. They need a better start in the formative years, before school. They need a doctor and a dentist and maybe a social worker.
Asa professes that his policies will spread the wealth when, in fact, they could well widen the gap.
It's as simple as this math: In the short term at least, cutting taxes by $200 million or so on incomes higher than $75,000 will require corresponding reductions in state government expenditures. Some of those cuts --or some of the stagnant spending levels--affect services meeting human needs for those very kids and their families trapped in a cycle of poverty on that different planet a six-hour drive from Benton County.
The governor actually boasted in his State of the State address that Arkansas has increased spending on pre-kindergarten programs--by which poor kids can get an early boost--"from $111 to $114 million in recent years."
He couldn't even say how many years were required for the state to raise pre-K spending by less than 3 percent.
And, yes, the state also seeks to trim money from the general revenue budget by tamping down Medicaid spending for the working poor, in part by setting up a legally dubious obstacle course for them to qualify to continue their health insurance.
We've thrown more than 17,000 people off health insurance for not completing the obstacle course, which was the point of the obstacle course.
And then there is this perfectly fair juxtaposition: The governor insists on taking $200 million out of the state coffers in a tax cut for higher incomes while he simultaneously is determined to refer to the voters a tax increase for highways of $200 million, probably on motor fuels. He could just stand pat, use the existing $200 million for highways, and not transfer a tax burden from the better off to the poor sap driving a pickup down the road every day to try to lift himself off Medicaid, assuming he hasn't been kicked off.
Some look to commerce anywhere in the state. Others look to fairness everywhere in the state.
A wiser policy might seek to do no harm where things are splendid, and to do good where things aren't.
Or you could look only on the bright side, banking on a rising yacht lifting all rafts.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 01/17/2019