Are you watching what the Republicans in our Legislature are about to do? They’re about to help the rich and corporations to get another tax cut.
Governor Hutchinson just called a special session for Tuesday, Dec. 7, with its focus primarily on his tax cut package aiming to reduce the state’s top income tax rate for the rich from 5.9 percent to 4.9 percent. Why do the richest people need a tax break now? It’s the lowest-income folks in our state who need a tax cut, or better yet, food, rent, and utilities. A tax break for low-income folks presupposes they made enough to make use of a tax break.
Arkansas seems not to be able to even dispense all the American Rescue Plan funds to the homeless and unemployed from the pandemic.
Governor Hutchinson’s Middle Class Tax Cuts between 2015-2020 made brutal cuts in education, human services, and Medicaid payments of $474,400,000. Here’s how it worked: workers making $21,500-$75,000 paid tax at 5 percent vs. the 6 percent previously charged, and if they made over $75,000 they paid for the overage at 6 percent vs. the 7 percent previously charged.
If you had asked low-income people—who needed food, medical care, better housing and more access to child care—if they wanted middle-class people to get a tax break, what do you suppose they would have said? Hello, legislators: One in six people in Arkansas do not have enough food to eat. Food is the No. 1 need a government has the responsibility to fulfill: a government who can’t feed its people should be replaced.
Even more outrageous: Hutchinson’s package includes tax cuts for big corporations. This tax plan would cost the state $135 million in 2022 and grow to nearly $498 million when fully implemented in 2026. Again, the cuts from 2015 to the present have already cut $474.4 million from our needed services to the elderly, Medicaid recipients, those needing child care or elder care, and the disabled.
So just to 2022, we can see he’s cut $135 million plus $474.4 million ($609.4 million total) in revenues that would be very useful for those financially struggling in our state!
Remember, the first week he was in office, Governor Hutchinson gave a “tax-free first million dollars” to his rich friends in the state, costing tons of services for food, medical care, better housing, more access to childcare, etc. You wonder where the money to take care of people in need went? To those in the pack of 1,532 millionaires who made over a million dollars in 2015, there’s where it went! He also boasts of cutting 1,100 jobs in state government. Wonder how those families look at that figure he’s so proud of?
Folks, if you don’t stop your legislators this week, they will have baked this cake to take services away from people who really need them, under the guise of reducing waste by helping the wealthy people they know, a few hundred people at the top income levels. How many proofs that “trickle down” economics doesn’t work does it take for us to stop voting for people who cut taxes for the wealthy? For a list of proofs, email me at dinacnash2014@gmail.com .
And watch for the even more seriously sinister move some of your guys will make to pass a Texas-style anti-abortion law in our fair state. Retirees and women with an hour of free time, please get busy on the phone to stop this and pack the Legislature for this special session!
Dina C. Nash is a retired social worker and criminologist in Fayetteville.