What the state doesn’t need

Sunday, October 28, 2012

— So how, exactly, will the sky fall on Arkansas if Republicans take control next week of as many as 25 of 35 state Senate seats and 60 of 100 House seats?

It’s a fair question deserving a fair answer, which I hereby provide in four parts. There are other parts, but there is not infinite space.

1.) Public school standards will be imperiled in a way that could land the state back in court for failure to ensure an equitable and adequate educational opportunity for all children.

The threat would come from Republican legislation to impair the state Education Board’s authority to regulate as strictly as it regulates now the awarding of licenses for charter schools.

The peril also would come from a concurrent Republican push, fueled by the conservative Heritage Foundation’s targeting of Arkansas, to provide more general school choice. That means greater authority for students to move among public schools.

These are perfectly valid conservative concepts designed to introduce competition to the delivery of public education.

But these concepts could lead to a drain of students and resources from certain public schools. That could leave less opportunity for stranded students who are unwilling or unable to transfer. Then those adversely affected school districts and their students conceivably could raise a credible legal grievance under the precedent of the historic Lake View case.

I like some charter schools. I want them to apply special tactics to special needs, such as those in the Delta. I want them to show new and better teaching methods to traditional public education. I want traditional public education to stop resisting.

But I don’t want charter schools to abound wholesale. The state does not need that.

2.) Income-tax rates would be cut across the board, reducing state government income-at least in the short run-and dictating spending cuts.

Unlike the federal government, state government is cutting spending when cutting taxes. Under the Revenue Stabilization process, if money is not coming in, then it simply does not go out. State officials are legally required to assess the revenue stream at all times and adjust spending levels as needed, even in mid-fiscal year.

Republicans say lower income-tax rates would provide a job magnet for the state. I doubt that, but, even if it were true, we couldn’t expect the magnet to work instantly. But spending cuts would apply instantly.

3.) So where might you guess that our state legislators have historically cut first when faced with a general revenue reduction?

The answer is higher education, meaning colleges and universities. It’s the path of least resistance. Colleges can keep raising tuition, or so legislators seem to think.

And what do economic development specialists say is our state’s greatest failing in achieving modern economic growth?

It is that we are at the very bottom nationally in the percentage of our population with college degrees, much less advanced ones now widely required in developing fields.

The job magnet actually might be a job killer.

4.) You can forget Medicaid expansion with federal money to help UAMS, Children’s Hospital, rural hospitals, working poor people and the general state economy.

A new Republican legislative majority would do one thing for sure, if nothing else: It would nullify whatever part of Obamacare it could reach.

Even worse, the budget constraints forced by the income-tax reductions would require that the Legislature address the already existing Medicaid shortfall not with more money, but reduced services.

Republicans prefer that to the Beebe administration’s new efforts at fashioning efficiencies in reimbursements to providers for certain conditions. They want to cut recipients before they inconvenience physicians.

Children and old people in nursing homes, who get most of our Medicaid money, are not easy targets for cutting.

That leaves people with disabilities.

I continue to wait for the state Democratic Party to design a coherent, cohesive statewide message to resist this looming Republican takeover.

At present, the party still seems content to rely on the supposed local popularity of their candidates. It seems content not to try to join its various campaigns under a general statewide theme.

It can’t push Medicaid expansion because some of its candidates actually are disguised Republicans running against Medicaid expansion.

Arkansas Republicans stand for something. It is irrational disdain for Barack Obama.

Arkansas Democrats stand for something, too. It is herding enough cats to stay in power for the sake of staying in power.

“Change is hard,” state Rep. Charlie Collins of Fayetteville, a Republican tax-cut fanatic with whom I get along, told me last week, as if to pat me on the back.

And some change is a bad idea.

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John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett. arkansasonline.com.

Editorial, Pages 85 on 10/28/2012