It appears the idea of putting sales taxes back on groceries has crashed and burned before takeoff.
That might have been predictable.
It's not as horrible an idea as it sounds, in context. I'm going to explain that. But it's no matter. Politics is music. It is how it sounds.
It sounds quite awful, doesn't it?
You have legislators advancing the idea at the state Capitol. Then you have a local television station going to a supermarket and asking shoppers a question that answers itself: How would they like seeing more sales taxes added at the bottom of that long grocery receipt?
Why, that'd be just peachy, thank you.
I'm kidding. Of course.
Then a little-known Democratic candidate for governor looking for an opening sees one. Jared Henderson, hoping to introduce a new Arkansas Democratic generation and take on Asa Hutchinson in the fall, puts out a news release saying people will not be paying more sales taxes on their bread and milk and eggs if he becomes governor and has anything to say about it.
It seems the normally cautious Hutchinson got so distracted going around the state trying to out-conservative Jan Morgan that he let ham-handed legislators make a little mess back at the Capitol.
Here's a summary of what led to this flare-up.
Hutchinson intends when re-elected to reduce personal income-tax rates further. It's a Republican thing. He and Republicans believe cutting income taxes stimulates job growth.
Some Republicans have always thought former Gov. Mike Beebe's steady drawdown of the state sales tax on groceries--now down to 1.5 percent and set to go away nearly altogether early next year--was a silly campaign promise that kept the state from affording more valuable cuts in income-tax rates.
So, at the governor's behest, the Legislature set up a task force that is now at work scouring all sales-tax exemptions on the books. The idea is to see if a few could be put back to raise money to offset the budgetary impact of the income-tax cuts coming next year.
At a recent meeting, the task force agreed to include the grocery-tax reductions of the Beebe era on a list of possibilities suitable for study--mere study--for restoration.
Now this is important: The task force did that mainly because its expert out-of-state consultant told the truth on policy. It was that, if you really want to help low-income people, it is more efficient simply to cut their income taxes with some specific targeted rebate or credit than to draw down everyone's grocery tax.
Poor folks will get more money that way, probably, depending on the nature of the tax credit. Better-off folks can keep paying grocery taxes, fortifying the state treasury for an income-tax cut they will enjoy.
Let me rephrase in the interest of clarity: Taking the sales tax off groceries for everybody is not the smartest direct way to help poor people specifically. Targeted special income-tax cuts that affect no other classes of taxpayers--that's better.
The only problem is the sound of the music.
Confronted with Democrat Henderson's criticism, Asa interrupted his Morgan fixation to say he has always favored the grocery-tax cut. He said the only thing that had happened was that the legislative study group put a proposal on the table for debate, among scores of others.
When that didn't seem enough, Hutchinson made a second-day statement. He wanted no restoration of sales taxes on groceries, period.
If everyone in the state had time to attend seminars on the issue, then the reinstatement of grocery taxes in exchange for earned-income tax relief on low incomes would be a simple matter of (1) arithmetic and (2) whether you prefer a break at the grocery store as you go along or a lump sum after you file your taxes once a year.
But that's policy and mathematics. This is politics.
The idea that politicians would put back the grocery tax no sooner than they reduced it pursuant to a campaign promise ... that's some serious political dissonance.
It's probably never a good idea to let your expert tax-policy consultant get out ahead of your politics. And it's probably naïve to think you can put the issue of higher taxes on people's groceries up for study without somebody saying something.
There are other things you could do as policy, politics and math. You could keep the grocery exemption, grant an earned-income tax credit on low incomes, and make up the lost revenue by raising high-end personal income-tax rates.
But in this raging Republican environment, that one crashed before I could get it typed.
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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 05/06/2018