Category Archives: Elections

What the third party candidates said

By Steve Brawner
© 2014 by Steve Brawner Communications

It’s still a tossup as to who will be the next governor, but we know who it won’t be: neither Frank Gilbert nor Josh Drake, the Libertarian and Green Party nominees.

Gilbert, the Libertarian, and Drake also know neither of them will be the next governor – not in a system dominated by Republicans and Democrats. Nevertheless, they’ve put their names on the ballot.

Here’s the shorthand for what their parties stand for. Greens are pro-environment and pro-government health care. Libertarians are for less government in both economic and social issues.

Drake and Gilbert presented their cases during an Arkansas Press Association debate July 11 – and, by the way, kudos to the APA for giving them that opportunity. Here’s what they said …

About same sex marriage. Drake, the Green Party candidate, said the Constitution guarantees equal protection under the law, regardless of what the majority says. Gilbert said government should stay out of the marriage-defining business, adding that he was offended that his wedding preacher said he performed the ceremony by the authority vested in him by the state of Tennessee. The government had nothing to do with his marriage, he said.

About the “private option,” the state program that uses Obamacare dollars to buy private insurance for lower-income Arkansans. Gilbert, the Libertarian, opposes it “unequivocally” and criticized the legislative Republicans who made it possible. Arkansas should not be involved in a coalition with the debt-ridden federal government to make possible this “terrible idea tacked onto a disgusting idea,” he said. Drake said other civilized countries offer universal health care, and so should the United States. Absent that, he said it’s “absolutely lunacy” to consider turning down those federal dollars when many Arkansas hospitals are struggling.

About Arkansas’ bursting-at-the-seams prisons and jails. Gilbert said too many people are being arrested and incarcerated and said his first step as governor would be to “pardon every nonviolent drug offender in the state of Arkansas.” Drake said the war on drugs has been lost and that it’s time to consider if some people in prison really ought to be there.

About C&H Hog Farms, the industrial-sized farm that has prompted concerns about potential contamination of the nearby Buffalo River. Drake, the Green Party candidate, said such an operation should not be located near a watershed and that the state must protect its water supply and its tourist attractions. Gilbert said he didn’t trust bureaucrats to protect the environment and that water use disputes should be handled through the court system.

About the lottery being under closer control of the governor. Drake expressed doubts about giving the governor too much power and said he’s “not a big fan of the lottery” or of gambling in general. Gilbert said the lottery should be managed by private individuals rather than bureaucrats. Given the opportunity, he would end the lottery.

About taxes. Gilbert would eliminate personal and corporate income taxes as quickly as possible. Doing away with the costs of corporate welfare would make it easier, he said. Drake said taxes on the wealthy should be increased so the sales tax on food can be ended and other sales taxes lowered.

In his closing argument, Drake said third party candidates should be included in more debates and given more attention by the media. Having more political parties would be good for the press, he said, because contested races create more intellectually stimulating campaigns, which attract readers and viewers. He didn’t say it, but viable third party and independent candidates, given a chance to compete, might attract enough support that they could buy ads, too.

Gilbert cracked up the audience in his closing remarks by saying, “I encourage you to look around yourself and see if you think there’s a whole lot that the Libertarians can make worse, and that there might not be a thing or two that the Libertarians could make better. Pick up your dice, throw them, and if it comes up snake eyes, vote Libertarian.”

By the way, also participating in the APA debate were the two major party candidates – Asa what’s-his-name and Mike somebody.

One-sided approaches won’t stabilize the debt

By Steve Brawner
© 2014 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Is it possible to bring the government’s debt under control by focusing only on one area – raising taxes, for example, or cutting defense spending? Let’s return to the Debt Stabilizer to find out.

I wrote last week about the Debt Stabilizer, an online tool created by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget that lets average citizens make tax and spending choices – hopefully better ones than Congress has made – in order to reduce the public debt.

Currently $12.6 trillion, the public debt is the portion of the $17.6 trillion national debt that doesn’t include what the government has borrowed from itself, such as from Social Security. It’s currently 78 percent of the size of the economy and headed to nearly 150 percent by 2050. Historically, it’s been 40 percent.

The goal of the Debt Stabilizer exercise is to reduce the public debt to 60 percent of the economy by 2024. Doing so requires improving the government’s balance sheet by $4.84 trillion over 10 years – equal to $1.54 million for every American.

I managed to reduce the public debt to 59 percent of the economy, mostly by cutting spending while raising the gas tax and closing tax deductions, and then wrote about it in my last column. After I emailed the link to the CRFB, communications director Jack Deutsch replied with an observation: Try playing various roles – the defense cutter, the tax raiser, etc. You’ll see how one-sided approaches don’t work well.

Let’s see if he’s right.

I started by trying sort of a House Republican approach: Oppose most defense cuts, support most spending cuts, and support most tax cuts. That approach left me at 69 percent of gross domestic product by 2024 and at 60 percent by 2028. However, some of those spending cuts, including the steeper ones for Social Security and Medicare, are unlikely to materialize.

I next was more of a congressional Democrat – cut defense, increase social spending, tax the rich, etc. That option reduced the debt to 73 percent of the economy but did not put the country on a path to 60 percent. “Uh oh! You failed to reduce the debt to a sustainable level,” the Debt Stabilizer said.

Other imbalanced approaches were unsuccessful. I tried one that would be popular with many Americans – cut taxes and spending without touching Social Security and Medicare. That got me to 73 percent, same as the congressional Democrats. The same percentage was reached when I cut defense spending and pulled us out of Afghanistan but left everything else alone. Doing almost nothing but cutting foreign aid left the debt at 78 percent of the economy. Foreign aid is 1 percent of the budget.

There were several imbalanced approaches that reached 60 percent. Raising every tax on the list and ending every deduction reduced the debt to 57 percent of gross domestic product. Cutting spending wherever I could and leaving taxes alone reduced the debt to 56 percent. Cutting all the taxes and all the spending reduced the debt to 60 percent.

However, those spending cuts included politically unpopular reductions for Medicare, Social Security – even $30 billion less for school breakfasts. Realistically, they wouldn’t happen. My tax increases included similarly unlikely scenarios such as ending deductions for the powerful oil industry and reducing the amount that average Americans can deduct for charitable gifts.

When I started this exercise, I hoped to play the parts of Rep. Tom Cotton and Sen. Mark Pryor, but I soon decided I couldn’t do their positions justice – particularly Pryor, who can be hard to pin down. Safe to say that Cotton takes pretty much the congressional Republican approach, which requires a number of unlikely spending cuts. Pryor – at least based on how he’s campaigning – is somewhere in the neighborhood of congressional Democrats, who, as the Debt Stabilizer makes clear, “fail to reduce the debt to a sustainable level.”

If a family’s debt needed stabilizing or a small business were in trouble, everyone would gather around the table to consider what to cut and where extra income could be found. Probably no one would get everything they wanted, and if one tried to dictate, the rest would not buy in.

At some point, Americans and their elected officials hopefully will realize that the government is no different – that choices and compromises must be made. If that happens, the debt will be reduced to a sustainable level.

And if that never happens? Uh oh.

What led Rhoda to make his ‘Hillary comment’?

By Steve Brawner
© 2014 by Steve Brawner Communications

If you care way too much about Arkansas politics, then you may know that a Republican official said something he shouldn’t have said the other day.

The party’s 2nd Congressional District chairman, Johnny Rhoda, was quoted by U.S. News & World Report saying that if Hillary Clinton runs for president in 2016, “She’d probably get shot at the state line.” He went on to say, “Nobody has any affection for her. The majority don’t.”

The timing was especially bad, considering Clinton was scheduled to visit Little Rock Friday. A minor political firestorm erupted, and Rhoda resigned.

Rhoda is not an elected official, but he’s long been involved in Republican Party politics. The obvious question is, knowing what he knows, how could he have made such a comment to a national reporter?

And I suspect the answer is this: If he’s like a lot of us, he probably has said something like that before, or at least heard it in private.

Maybe not. It’s possible that Rhoda just made an unfortunate offhand comment out of the blue. Certainly, he did not mean to threaten or wish harm upon Clinton.

Let’s still use this episode to launch into a discussion of the bigger issue, which is that it’s becoming common for this kind of thing to be said in everyday and public conversation – more common than it used to be, it seems, but maybe I’m just imagining that. As memory serves, President Reagan used to fire off some real zingers at Democrats, but he described them as merely wrong, not evil. He reserved the truly tough rhetoric for the actual enemies who had missiles pointed at us and guns pointed at their own citizens.

Here’s how we live these days: in houses very similar to the ones around ours; in communities where most believe much the same way; in churches where most members are of the same background; in congressional districts drawn to ensure the like-minded vote together; in states that, with few exceptions, are either red or blue. We safely can consume only news media sources that assure us we must be correct because the other side is so very ill-intentioned. Even the ads on the websites we frequent are microtargeted to our likely political beliefs.

We have self-segregated in just about every way possible. Of course we believe “nobody has any affection” for politicians we don’t like. Nobody we discuss politics with ever does.

The result is that it becomes easy to turn human beings like Hillary Clinton into one-dimensional movie characters – heroes or villains.

Human beings are not movie characters. If Clinton were to visit most Republicans’ living rooms, I suspect everyone would soon find they had a lot more in common than they might have expected. She’s a lifelong Methodist, a daughter, a wife, a mother, and an expectant grandmother. Given her experiences, she’s probably an interesting conversationalist. The same would be true if President George W. Bush visited a family of Democrats, even though 35 percent of them once told a pollster that he had prior knowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks.

I don’t know that publicly making light of shooting people makes it more likely that anyone actually will get shot. Political assassination attempts in America are rare and often motivated by insanity more than belief.

But while we’re not killing people, we are dehumanizing them, and that’s bad for many reasons. On a national political level, it makes it more difficult for our representative democracy to function. On a personal level, it makes us less happy people. If we spend three hours listening to a radio talk show host tell us how much he dislikes certain people, pretty soon we’ll dislike them, too. And then we’ll say as much, even to a member of the national media.

So the bigger issue is not what one party official said to a journalist. The bigger issue is that we’re not relating to each other as well as we might, and the way our society is structured, it’s becoming easier not to try.

On the bright side, we’re not shooting each other at the state line. We didn’t relate too well with each other in the mid-1800s or during the civil rights struggle, either.

But a little more affection for each other would make this a more perfect union. Or at least, a less imperfect one.

Does Arkansas really need runoffs?

By Steve Brawner
© 2014 by Steve Brawner Communications

Leslie Rutledge and David Sterling, the state’s two remaining Republican candidates for attorney general, spent the weeks leading up to Tuesday’s runoff election scouring the state looking for votes. The question is, should they have had to?

They were “scouring” rather than “campaigning” because of the expected low turnout. (It was 5.4 percent.) All the other statewide races had already been decided in the party primaries, which themselves drew turnout of only 21.32 percent. A few local races – sheriff in Saline County, state Senate in the Harrison area – drew attention and voters.

That means those areas had an outsized influence in determining the Republican candidate for attorney general, along with three other groups: Republican diehards, people who believe it is their duty to vote in every election, and maybe a few Democrats who thought they might could manipulate the system by trying to vote for the worse candidate.

“The people” did not vote in this runoff. Only a few of the people did. And that’s a problem. Runoffs are supposed to select a nominee who has the broadest support, once the candidates who finished third or worse are eliminated. Instead, because of low turnout, the opposite is often the case. The candidate who can appeal to a motivated minority often wins. The more conservative candidate in the Republican Party and the more liberal candidate in the Democratic Party usually has the advantage even if they aren’t the best candidate. It also gives extra influence to outside groups like the one promoting Sterling for his support of a “stand your ground” law.

The practical reason for runoffs is to prevent an unacceptable candidate from sneaking into office because he or she manages a fluke win in a crowded field. In a multi-candidate race, it’s possible for a candidate to finish first thanks to the votes of a minority of voters but still be unacceptable to the majority. Arkansas, in fact, implemented runoffs in the 1930s to keep Ku Klux Klan members from getting elected that way.

Solutions? One is to have no runoffs at all. Only six other states require them when no candidate wins a majority – Mississippi, Alabama, Texas, Oklahoma, Georgia and South Carolina. In 43 states, Rutledge would have been the nominee because she won 47.21 percent of the vote in the primary May 20. Sterling won 39.11 percent.

Another solution is to lower the bar. Instead of requiring candidates to win 50 percent of the vote, make it 40 percent, as is the case in North Carolina. That would require a candidate to demonstrate broad support. In that case, Rutledge still would have been the nominee.

A third solution is instant runoff voting, where voters rank candidates in order of preference instead of just voting for one. A process of mathematical elimination chooses a winner who finished the highest on the most ballots.

There is one other solution. Primary voters could again make the trek to the polls in the runoff – even if it is for a position like attorney general that, though important, doesn’t excite much interest.

Elections should be democratic, fair and practical. Without a runoff, the primary, where a large number of people voted, would have selected an acceptable candidate in Rutledge. Sterling is also acceptable, but if he had won on Tuesday, then the candidate who won 39 percent of the vote in the primary would have beaten the candidate who won 47 percent.

Because of the runoff, the candidates had to raise money and find voters, taxpayers had to pay for a statewide election, volunteers had to man voting booths for a week – all to select a nominee based on 5.4 percent of the vote. This can’t be the best way.

Arkansas Week, June 6

I appeared on AETN’s “Arkansas Week” Friday with host Steve Barnes, longtime journalist Ernie Dumas, and KUAR’s Ernie Dumas. We discussed the upcoming runoff elections, the Pryor-Cotton Senate race, state revenues and the possible upcoming special session about school employee insurance.