The Arkansas General Assembly advanced a bill last week to reinstate a law removing taxation altogether from an individual capital gain exceeding $10 million.
Sounds like a joke, doesn't it? Actually, though, we're not nearly to the punchline yet.
When the measure was first passed two years ago, then-House Speaker Davy Carter explained that a guy selling something for that much profit would just leave the state for a tax haven if we tried to inconvenience him with a tax bill.
Inconvenience is much more easily imposed on home-bound poor people who are lucky to be able to get across town to work, much less to Florida.
The punchline is near.
Meantime, you see, the Legislature last week rejected a bill to give poor people an earned income tax credit for finding work for meager pay. Everybody ought to share the cost of government, said the Koch brothers' minions elected to impose billionaire industrialist values on our poor state's policymaking.
So there's the joke: We'll have no income taxes for a guy suddenly awash in $10 million for something he sold. But, because everyone ought to share the burden, we'll give no income-tax break to a guy who pays sales taxes on his clothing and motor-fuel taxes for gasoline for his clunker so he can get to a job paying less than $20,000 a year, not a living wage.
I'm cracking up over here.
State Rep. Warwick Sabin of Little Rock, liberal Democrat and endangered species, proposed the tax break for poor working people. He said history would judge this legislative session on the issue of fairness--in the context of what was being done for low-income people amid the capital gains exemption and Gov. Asa Hutchinson's priority to cut taxes only for the middle class.
So it appears our best hope is that history will have a dark sense of humor.
An earned income tax credit was embraced by Ronald Reagan, then Bill Clinton. You only get it if, as the name implies, you earn income by getting a job. Below a certain income level, you get credit for the income taxes you otherwise would owe on those meager wages.
It's not a welfare deal; it's a work deal.
Some Republican members of the House Revenue and Taxation Committee complained mightily that the credit would be refundable and, in fact, a person might get a refund exceeding his tax bill.
But, if so, it would be an incentive for working, not staying home. And, if so, the income-tax arrangement would merely serve to mitigate other unfair taxes the poor worker pays. A few dollars in income-tax credits would only begin to ease the regressive sales taxes of the necessities of life and the regressive per-gallon tax on gasoline.
Never fear: A poor man will always pay more than his fair percentage so long as there are sales taxes and gasoline taxes.
But in this Koch brothers' billionaire industrialist celebration society that we've installed in state government, the poor working man ought to fork over sales taxes and property taxes and gasoline taxes and income taxes because everyone else does--except for the guy with a $10 million profit--and the poor guy already taps the more admirable rest of us for Medicaid or an Obamacare subsidy for his health insurance, which, by the way, we can't wait to take from him.
If all these Republican legislators who just got their pay more than doubled for a few weeks' work a year really believe poor people get too many advantages, then let them take vows of poverty and join their ranks.
Any takers? Didn't think so.
These Koch-elected folks value only "job creators," which is their euphemistic phrase for people lucky enough to be loaded.
We can be a mean state, a cruel one, resisting humane treatment of animals, celebrating the wealthy and relieving them of taxes, disdaining the working poor and denying them tax breaks, and, as it happens, champing at the bit to start killing people again now that the Arkansas Supreme Court has said our new death-penalty statute is constitutional.
But we may get a monument to the Ten Commandments on the state Capitol grounds, telling us not to do many of the things we insist on doing.
I'd prefer a monument to the Sermon on the Mount with its blessings for the poor in spirit and meek and those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.
Forgive the mixing of religion and politics, but I'm as entitled as Jason Rapert and Justin Harris.
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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, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 03/29/2015