State government confronts a big surplus and Republican legislative sentiment to save some of it for Sarah Sanders' convenience rather than spend it now on teachers.
There is some reasoning. But the bottom line is priority. Let me explain.
You just helped pay state government $1.6 billion more than it needed for its budget in the fiscal year ending June 30.
Annual overage is not a bad thing, but essential. Spare dollars go into needed capital improvement projects and vital reserves in case of a now not-unlikely recession.
But $1.6 billion is extreme, about 60 percent more than any annual surplus ever.
The bonanza came about because borrowed federal dollars sustained the state during covid, then the state budgeted stingily out of uncertainty about the recovery, then the economy stormed back, with businesses reopening and new post-epidemic worker attitudes resulting in higher low-end wages, which got rapidly turned around because low-end wages don't go into savings, but getting by.
Gov. Asa Hutchinson proposes to spend a significant chunk of the surplus on accelerating to immediate full effect the already approved, but phased-in, reductions in income-tax rates. He wants to spend tens of millions on school safety improvements and to match federal highway money. He wants to beef up reserve and emergency funds.
All of that sounds good to go in terms of publicly expressed legislative attitudes toward a special session in August.
But Hutchinson also proposes to put $150 million of the surplus into a higher minimum teacher salary and $4,200 teacher raises beyond that. We're losing teachers and falling behind surrounding states in paying them.
That proposal is the one being met by seemingly prevailing legislative resistance.
The legislative concern, not wrong, is that we'd be putting one-time money into ongoing obligations that could amount to a future unfunded mandate for school districts. But the same concern ought to exist, but doesn't much, for putting an even-larger surplus chunk into immediate income-tax cuts that also would impose ongoing obligations not just on school districts.
The House majority leader, Marcus Richmond, is on record wanting Sarah Sanders to get plenty of surplus if she becomes governor in January.
He wants that so that she could cut income taxes even more, presumably.
She, while not specific about any policy, and while campaigning mainly with demagogic tweets about the kicking the national liberals' tails on woke stuff, has vowed to phase not down, but "out," the state income tax.
Cutting income taxes now while also raising ongoing teacher-pay obligations would pose a double-shot of inconvenience to her latitude to cut income taxes even more in her governorship as a junior DeSantis launching a new era of Arkansas as an outpost for Donald Trump's next coup attempt.
Since no Republican legislator is going to vote against reducing income taxes any time under any governor, teacher salaries seem to be where financial prudence will be exclusively applied.
After all, legislative Republicans say, teachers will get more money from the general income-tax reduction.
In other words, what's good for the wealthy person getting a top-rate reduction ought to be enough for a teacher.
Richmond was quoted in this paper Sunday as saying Republicans "don't want to leave a dry trough if [Sanders] is elected as governor."
I think that means they'd want to run the trough dry if they thought there was any way Democrat Chris Jones would become governor, which they don't.
Legislators say we can focus on teacher pay under Governor Sanders. But she is hostile to public schools, saying in fiery little tweets that our schools are no good, teach liberal things, and ought to be subjected to more competition from private and charter schools.
I've expressed appropriate concern about using one-time money for ongoing needs. But that math applies as much, or more, to income-tax reduction as teacher salaries. And the concern is countered by the bountiful reserves of nearly $2 billion, which could cushion any transitional strain and remain bountiful.
Spending all that up now probably would be better than letting Sanders play with it so she can further take down, or out, income taxes.
We'd wind up with unfunded mandates galore.
But the legislative priority seems to be this looming dark cloud of a new era in Arkansas, replacing the one launched by Winthrop Rockefeller in 1966 and followed by every governor since to varying degrees.
We've had the era of the three M's: moderation, modernization ... and, oh yeah, math.
This new era offers right-wingness in place of moderation, regressive Faubusian demagoguery in place of modernization, and an aversion to critical math theory.
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.