Asa Hutchinson, working hard to be the governor who spends more money without raising more money--a fine Reagan-esque tradition--announced last week that he'd found the solution to the state's immediate highway-funding shortage.
The problem is that we're driving less with smaller automotive engines and thus buying fewer gallons of gasoline, which means we're paying less in per-gallon taxes for road construction and maintenance, the price of which is rising.
We've become so personally efficient that we can't even match the available federal highway money, except, that is, for several hundred million dollars from a special account to mess up downtown Little Rock big-time with a mega-wide freeway running through its front yard.
Asa's solution to the state highway deficiency is ... and let's roll the drum here, please ... Obamacare.
Don't believe me? Here's what Hutchinson said: His highway plan "is not workable if we do not have access to the federal funds that are part of the Medicaid expansion."
That's Obamacare.
Please understand that Hutchinson remains on record wanting to repeal that heathen Democratic program.
There is no indication yet what the governor will propose to solve the highway problem if he gets his way and his solution is destroyed.
There also is no indication whether the governor suffered any personal injury when he ran into himself coming and going.
Asa proposes a two-step:
First, we break with time-honored principle and, for the first time, divert to highways a sum of general revenue, which comes from general taxes like those on sales and income and has always gone to general needs such as schools and colleges and prisons and human services.
Roads heretofore have been paid for exclusively by an entirely separate and independent account comprising road-user fees--motor-fuel taxes, mainly, except for the special sales tax dedicated to highway bonds by voter approval of a constitutional amendment a few years ago.
Second, Hutchinson wants to absorb the loss to general revenue--$75 million or so a year over 10 years--by relying on the hundreds of millions of dollars that Obamacare funnels to us every year to expand Medicaid, which in turn produces additional indirect savings by transferring medical costs from providers and taxpayers to private insurance policies.
If the Legislature fails to achieve a three-fourths majority vote to keep appropriating this federal Medicaid matching money for our nationally extolled "private option," then state government suddenly would be down hundreds of millions of dollars in its general revenue budget.
That is to say we then couldn't rob Peter to pay Paul as the governor proposes, because Peter would be a pauper, like Paul.
It is always possible that our anti-government and arithmetically defiant Republican state legislative caucus could fail to achieve the three-fourths majority for Obamacare and the private option. To try to avoid that, Hutchinson is proposing to change the name--to Arkansas Works. He also is asking the Obama administration, the source of all solutions, apparently, to let us base our continued use of Medicaid money for private insurance policies on some kind of work-training requirement for recipients.
So to summarize: We must embrace Obamacare in Arkansas or we will wind up with potholes so big they'll swallow up our little energy-efficient cars.
Meantime, let us not forget the underlying affront of taking money from schools, colleges, prisons, police and social services to divert to roads.
Hutchinson says all our abutting states apply general revenue to roads--as if it's a good thing to emulate the nation's most primitive jurisdictions, places like Oklahoma and Mississippi.
Hutchinson would have you believe this is a simple matter of dedicating some of the annual surplus that otherwise might be squandered by legislators on local play-pretties back home.
And that's actually true enough. But let's be clear. He proposes to use $48 million of the surplus each year for highways. That means the $48 million is not surplus, but a regular budget item.
Pre-emptively dedicating $48 million of expected collections in excess of budget outlays is a back-door entry that puts you in the same place as if you'd come in through the front door and appropriated $48 million directly through the general revenue operating budget.
It's offensive and troubling, but probably do-able without extreme pain or horrid injustice--if, that is, the Obama recovery continues and Asa fails in his effort to repeal Obamacare and cut off his own lifeline.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 01/28/2016