I'd like to offer the state a deal. If somebody will pay me a net taxable annual income of $456,000, I will fall over myself with glee to pay 6.9 percent in state income taxes.
And I will hire somebody--at least at the minimum wage the voters set, and that Sen. Bob Ballinger wants to reduce--to work for me doing administrative tasks.
I calculate that I'm going to have quite a bit of slack between the money I'll be getting and the level of middle-class comfort to which I've become happily accustomed.
This employee can begin by unjamming the printer, organizing this disaster area that is my work station, and spending a day or two on the phone with AT&T about getting my bill down.
I think I could save more on phone costs than I'd pay at 6.9 percent on $456,000, if only I had the courage and patience to wade into the international customer-service quagmire.
I do not understand this huffy defense by Republicans of rich people whenever someone comes along proposing not to raise rich people's taxes but simply to keep their rate where it was when they got rich in the first place.
The other morning the House Revenue and Taxation Committee heard impassioned pleas from Democrats and bleeding hearts against a $73.6 million income tax cut for the 14,000 people in the state making more than $456,000 a year.
The pleas were that the state's income-tax system and general policies already were pro-rich and anti-poor enough, and that the top 1 percent didn't really need the money to get by in style.
The pleas were further that we're in the process of putting more gasoline taxes on the working man headed down the road in a pickup, and that, if the working man can't afford to get to his job, his reward would be to get kicked off Medicaid for being the profligate non-working poor.
If anything gets under the skin of a Republican legislator more than a committee witness wanting to keep rich people's taxes where they are, it's a poor person needing some government help.
Republican state Reps. James Wooten of Beebe and Robin Lundstrom of Springdale jumped in the middle of witnesses Tuesday morning for calling rich people evil and lazy, which no one did.
They said rich people give to charity, which I already knew on account of rich people having their pictures all over that Soiree magazine from the fundraising parties.
Giving to charity reduces their taxes, by the way.
Then the committee rejected on a voice vote an amendment by outnumbered and beleaguered Democrats to remove the tax cut only for those making $456,000-plus. Then it gave a do-pass recommendation to the unchanged tax-cut bill by a vote of 15-2. And all of that was done under the committee chairmanship of state Rep. Joe Jett, who, until a couple of years ago, was a centrist Democrat.
Welcome to just another everyday morning in red-gone-wild Arkansas.
Sen. Jonathan Dismang of Beebe, a big-dog Republican and a sponsor of Gov. Asa Hutchinson's tax cut, was asked how, exactly, dropping the state's top-bracket rate from 6.9 percent to 5.9 percent would stimulate business development in the state.
His answer was that he wasn't promising any busloads of 5.9 percent payers. But, gosh, he said, surely it would help that Arkansas would no longer stand out like a sore thumb with the highest top rate in the region.
Everybody knows that no one makes money in high-tax places like California and New York.
As I've explained to you before, 5.9 percent would be lower than Louisiana's 6.0 percent. It is this clever one-upmanship, or one-downmanship, you must understand, that would cause out-of-state investors to stream in here rather than to Texas or Florida where their rate would be 0.0, and where a lot of our rich Arkansas people move their official residences already to avoid our taxes.
There is no indication as yet that those people will move back when 6.9 goes to 5.9.
Instead of lowering taxes rich people aren't paying anyway, maybe Arkansas should begin a marketing campaign promoting the state as a place where you can reap your fortune while pretending to live somewhere else that won't tax that fortune--at all.
I'm thinking of a new Arkansas sales pitch, suitable for a full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal: "We don't have income taxes either--if you make enough to build a second mansion in Florida or Texas."
So, I'll offer the state another deal: Pay me $456,000 year after year and I will commit to stay here permanently and remit that 6.9 percent year upon year.
I like it here.
The daffodils are up. The dogwoods are warming up. Razorback fans love my Twitter trolls. Most of the people not in the Legislature are nice.
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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 02/14/2019