In early 2007 the then-speaker of the state House of Representatives, rural Democrat Benny Petrus, was pitching his better idea to help poor people.
Rather than generally drawing down the sales tax on groceries for everybody, he proposed that we deliver targeted income-tax cuts only to low-income people.
I remember telling him he was right, but that the problem was that he hadn't just been elected governor after saying he was born in a tar-paper shack and would get rid of the unfair sales tax on poor folks' bread and milk.
Then-Gov. Mike Beebe prevailed. The grocery sales tax was drawn down over Beebe's eight years in office to 1.5 percent.
Let's fast-forward. Today we inch ever closer to the last installment of the state's Little Rock School settlement payments. That would trigger a Beebe-era law using those savings to reduce the grocery tax further, to 0.0125, probably in January.
Meantime, it is unfair to say that a legislative task force looking for ways to help Gov. Asa Hutchinson afford personal income-tax cuts next year is considering re-imposing the sales tax on poor people's groceries so that rich people could pay less in income taxes.
It's dandy spin, technically arguable on an over-simplified abuse of facts. But the news contains entirely too much of that kind of thing these days.
Bear with me, then, as we endeavor to un-spin this issue.
It is true that Hutchinson, having cut income-tax rates in his first term for low- and middle-income taxpayers, wants next year to reduce the top rate of 6.9 percent to 6, at least, for starters.
It is true that he supported establishing a legislative tax force, co-headed by his nephew and incoming Senate president pro tempore Jim Hendren, to spend last year and this analyzing the entire tax structure.
It is true that the real intent of the task force was to find sales-tax exemptions that perhaps could be repealed to raise a few tens of millions of dollars to offset at least in part the cost to the general fund of the desired income-tax cuts next year.
It is true that, just the other day, the task force got around to identifying 40 or so such sales-tax exemptions it will study further for possible repeal. Any task force member could put an exemption on the list. The only thing that is signaled by an exemption's presence is that at least one unidentified task force member wanted it there.
It is true that restoring some or all the sales tax on groceries is on the list.
Hendren told me that no one to his knowledge is remotely envisioning a straight trade to put sales taxes back on poor people's groceries and use those restored revenues to pay for an income-tax cut at the highest rate.
The appearances of that, barely a decade after the promised Beebe draw-down began, make it a likely nonstarter politically, even amid the currently raging right-wing obsession with punishing poor people because it's supposedly their own fault they're poor.
Anyway, there are complications and subtleties to such things.
Restoring grocery taxes would raise taxes not simply on poor people, but on high-income taxpayers who pay more for food than poor people because they can afford more items generally and more expensive ones specifically--fresh produce, fresh seafood, premium health-conscious products, gourmet items and the finest cuts of meat.
Even people on the left will tell you, as Benny Petrus told me back in the '00s, that taking the sales tax off food is not the best way to give a tax break to, and bestow tax fairness on, poor people.
A blanket repeal of grocery taxes sends most of the cash to higher-income people. An earned-income tax credit for those of lowest incomes--a policy by which low-level income recipients earn tax credits with their income, even to the point of earning credits exceeding their tax bill and are then refundable to them--is a better way to help poor people.
Hendren told me his reading was that the only way the Legislature might even consider restoring even a portion of the sales tax on groceries would be in conjunction with an earned-income tax credit for lowest incomes. The additional grocery taxes then paid by higher-income taxpayers presumably would be offset by lower personal income-tax rates, which Republicans prefer.
I'm thinking the only way conservative Republicans would go for the earned-income tax credit is if the credits were capped at eliminating the tax otherwise due, rather than refundable above that point.
I suppose I can foresee one other incremental possibility: The Legislature next year could repeal only the new incremental grocery-tax reduction tied to the end of school settlement payments.
The main damage of ending the food exemption and going instead with a low-income earned-income tax credit would be to Beebe's legacy, which is otherwise all right.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 04/12/2018