How is it that an overwhelmingly Republican state Legislature born from the anti-government Tea Party movement beginning in 2010 is likely to vote to raise motor-fuel taxes for a big highway program?
One reason is that the Tea Party movement in Arkansas never was as much anti-government generally as anti-Barack Obama specifically.
Most especially, it was scared out of its wits by the Obama administration's changes in health insurance. Those changes were largely misunderstood, never more than when a woman shouted to then-U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln, a Democrat bound for defeat that year, that she didn't want government sticking its nose in her Medicare.
Several of the new Republican state legislators elected in 2010, and even some since, came to Little Rock on a voter mandate to undo Obamacare.
It didn't matter that they couldn't undo Obamacare from Little Rock, since the Affordable Care Act was a federal congressional matter.
All the state Legislature could do to stymie Obamacare was turn down its sole state option, which was Medicaid expansion. But the Arkansas Legislature famously embraced that in an innovative way with the private option that a Republican governor has salvaged by rebranding it a works program and throwing people off the rolls for not working.
Arkansas never has made much sense politically. Even as its Republican brand of conservatism has become standardized in a national sense based on the influence of Fox News and the Internet, the state's voters haven't much followed state issues or held state legislators much to account.
Arkansas voters couldn't stand Obama. They can't stand Hillary Clinton. They love Donald Trump. They think their governor is swell, whatever his name--Huckabeebe or Hutchinson or something like that.
The state Legislature is something for Arkansas voters to gripe about generally while the local representative--a personal acquaintance, usually--is held in reasonably high regard.
Anyway, when conservatives talk about cutting taxes, they almost always are talking about income taxes.
Conservatives abhor income taxes because those are the taxes paid in readily measurable amounts through paycheck withholdings and annual tax returns. They announce themselves.
That Arkansas taxpayers face a greater real burden from sales taxes is of little consequence to the conservative sensibility. The right-wing theory is that income taxes are pre-emptively confiscated, thus bad, but that sales taxes are paid voluntarily by the taxpayer on a supposedly equal basis, at the same rate for everyone, thus good.
Never mind that sales taxes aren't paid voluntarily, but under duress, for many essential items, even with grocery-store food now largely exempted. Never mind that it's the very equality of the amount that makes the sales tax a disproportionate and unfair burden to lower-income people.
To modern conservative Republicans, a tax cut means only one thing--a reduction in income taxes, even if it goes inordinately to those with more money already.
What matters, then, in the modern conservative Arkansas voter's mind is that this Legislature has just cut income taxes, not that the Legislature is now turning around and voting to raise taxes at the fuel pump.
To the contemporary conservative mind, a motor-fuel tax is less a matter of government confiscation than a simple user fee, like a toll road.
The state is known for driving more miles per capita than most other states, where mass-transit opportunities are prevalent and where less of the economic culture is from farm roads to markets, one person per vehicle.
Most Republican state legislators are hearing from their civic leaders at home that they need the highway program--for reasons including that new money raised by increased fuel taxes fattens the proceeds of the turnback to city and county governments. And conservatives want the local government, at least, to be flush.
A tax increase for a highway program tends in Arkansas to become a statewide version of a local millage election for a popular project.
That's why the modern-day state Senate could call the roll in search of a majority 18 votes to approve the fuel-tax increase and do so with 22 sponsors for the proposal.
And it explains why legislators will go home in a few weeks to local praise for two things--cutting income taxes and doing something about highways, including the referral of a constitutional amendment by which voters would put a sales tax on themselves for even more highway money.
I'll wager they'll pass the sonofagun.
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.
Web only on 02/20/2019