The near-and-dear editorialists have struck again.
This time they've lent troubling depth, previously non-existent, to Lt. Gov. Tim Griffin's self-advancing political wish that the state could do away with the personal income tax somehow, some day and some way.
On Sunday, a near-and-dear editorial [in the Democrat-Gazette’s Little Rock edition] invoked in that context David Pryor's brief ignominious period, the mid-1970s.
As governor then, Pryor got sold on the misbegotten notion that the state should reduce its income tax, authorize home rule by local governments, and pass back to those local governments the discretion for any increased and newly created taxes they might choose locally for the services they might require or desire locally. He called it the Arkansas Plan.
In one of the modern political era's great ironies, the Arkansas General Assembly, of all bodies, saved the state from a village-to-village smorgasbord of inequities and inadequacies by summarily rejecting this popular and otherwise progressive governor's manifestation of an odd and low moment.
A personal aside, if I may, for historic richness and self-celebration: During this Pryor nadir, I was a class-cutting college student at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway, apprenticing at the local Log Cabin Democrat, where I had recently been moved from sports writing to newswriting with an emphasis on politics.
I got dispatched to Little Rock to cover a couple of Pryor's announcement events, even to interview him in his office.
In some class or another in government or politics, I forget which, and on a rare day of my attendance, the professor told the class of my intimacy with these major state-government goings-on in Little Rock and asked me to make a report.
I said the governor of the state seemed to have lost his mind and that higher education would be threatened above everything else by such state-abdicated nonsense.
I don't know if it struck me at that moment that I might make a lifelong living saying things like that.
Anyway, back on point: It seems possible that Griffin did not intend anything deeper than to demagogue against income taxes in service to his gubernatorial candidacy for 2022. He seems more inclined to imitate than ideate.
But the near-and-dear editorialists are thinkers, and they seemed Sunday to tie Griffin to a resurrection of the Pryor concept. They suggested government might in time indeed do away with the state income tax along with equitable state turnback to local governments, and that counties and cities could then, on their own, consider property taxes and other revenue sources.
You might drive a four-lane highway through one county and then blast onto a gravel road in the next, which surely would rock the struts and stir up dust.
Maybe the highway sign could warn, "Different planet--one mile."
(That is hyperbole to make a point--a metaphorical one, kind of. There is no indication--yet--that Griffin or the editorialists want to amend Mack-Blackwell out of the state Constitution and do away with centralized and constitutionally independent highway administration.)
But, speaking of constitutional amendments, we might need three of them, at least, to do away with the state income tax and decentralize taxes and services with a presumed greater reliance on the local property tax.
One would change or revise the current state constitutional provision providing limitations on countywide property appraisal increases and establishing different categories of real property with different tax treatments.
Another would be needed expressly to authorize home rule itself. Currently, local governments can do nothing beyond those things specifically provided in the Constitution (property taxes) or delegated by statute by the state (local-option sales taxes).
And the third ... it might be the biggest of all.
The famous Lake View case law provides that the state Constitution, by mandating a quality education, makes state government singularly responsible and accountable for an equal and adequate education district to district, child to child. That's achieved, or attempted, by the distribution of state general revenue to school districts on a formula designed to provide something resembling equal spending when meshed with the disparate local property wealth and tax rates.
So, reviving the Arkansas Plan as the Griffin/editorialist solution would require that the voters approve a rather basic constitutional amendment.
I'm thinking about a forthcoming general election with the voters considering on their ballots that cycle's Issue 1. It would say, "The state is not responsible for the education of its children."
A state that gave 62 percent of its vote to Donald Trump might pass such a thing.
The school-choice people ought to like it. They might argue that everyone is free to drive away from one school on a dirt road to one on a four-lane highway.
That's speaking, again, metaphorically, with roads representing opportunity and quality of life, and the abrupt change in surfaces representing a bumpy ride leaving a knot on a state's head.
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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.