Joining the South

The state Legislature meets in supposedly "special" session this week to do decidedly ordinary things simply because other largely unreconstructed Southern states do them.

We'll go in debt to subsidize a big employer, even as we pretend to eschew public debt and even as we deplore that the federal government burdens us with so much of that which we steadily compile.

And we'll move our primary next year to the same abnormally early and inconvenient midwinter date, March 1, being used by some of our Southeastern Conference siblings.

We can only hope other Southern states don't jump off the Main Street Bridge.


So this week's exercise further confirms the homogenization of Arkansas into an indistinguishable sub-jurisdiction of the neo-Confederate nation, a sub-jurisdiction that is culturally and politically blended with the sub-jurisdictions around it.

Once, not long ago, Arkansas was a peculiar island in an otherwise homogenized South. Our politics was different, unique.

Our Razorbacks were different, a lone team to which the entire state was devoted, and to which local high school talent was drawn automatically, and which played some of its games up there and some of its games down here.

Our athletic heyday was as a literal lone outlier in a Texas conference. Now our college athletic program is a western satellite of a southeastern league, drawing recruits from Florida and Virginia but not all that many from Arkansas, and certainly few from North Little Rock, where the best high school football player opted for Ohio State and the best high school basketball player chose Florida.

Now we're fully pureed into a single culture from the Carolinas over through Oklahoma.

Arkansas and Mississippi and Alabama and Oklahoma and Tennessee are now pimples on the same face.

When Mike Huckabee moved from Arkansas to the Florida panhandle, his was more an intra-regional relocation than interstate one. That's exempt for income taxes, which Arkansas has and Florida doesn't, and which he was avoiding.

But Arkansas is currently embarked on a gradual drawdown of income taxes, so as to be more like its SEC siblings, even as its legislators talk of aborting the process Mike Beebe started to draw down the sales tax on poor folks' groceries.

So why is it that we are assembling our legislators to approve more than a hundred million dollars in general-fund debt in order to hand $87 million to Lockheed-Martin?

It is so that Lockheed-Martin can reduce its corporate cost and thus profitably lower the price of a military transport vehicle to be built in Camden by more than 500 workers. The Pentagon is champing to buy the vehicles if Lockheed-Martin can successfully tap the Arkansas taxpayers to make its price a little less outrageous as compared to other bids.

But here's really why, and here's what had legislators' heads nodding when I said it last week as moderator of a panel: The real issue is that some other states, likely Mississippi or Alabama, both in hock to automakers, would give Lockheed-Martin the deal and land the jobs if we balked.

Back in December I joined Talk Business founder Roby Brock for a presentation to a dinner of local chambers of commerce officials from around Arkansas. When I asked whether prospective employers were worried about income-tax rates, more than one of the local chamber executives said they weren't.

When I asked what prospective employers did want, a guy in the back said, as others nodded, "they want to know what handouts we have for them."

It hasn't always been quite that way. Jobs once came to an area because of educational commitment, a work ethic, a transportation system and the availability of land or facilities. It was other poor states of the South, trying to land jobs so they wouldn't have to pay for welfare, who created the current culture of the ransom.

Meantime, the idea of the southern-wide primary on March 1 is partly for orderliness--to better select the presidential nominees early--and partly to enhance the South's role.

The latter, at least, will prove futile, at least for Arkansas.

So far Georgia, Virginia, Tennessee, Alabama, Oklahoma and now apparently Arkansas have signed up for the regional extravaganza. Mississippi likely will go a week later, and Florida and Texas will stick to their own schedules.

Let me tell you who gets lost first and worst in all that: Arkansas.

We're the smallest participant. Most likely, Mike Huckabee will flail around long enough to still be in the race at that time. The actually viable GOP candidates won't compete here because of the low delegate count and Huckabee's likely victory.

But we'll have 500-plus jobs on their way to Camden and the debt to remind us how we got them.

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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 05/28/2015

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