Category Archives: Politics

Psst: We’re winning

By Steve Brawner

© 2017 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Amidst the unsettling news coming from North Korea and the hysteria over whatever is President Trump’s latest tweet, you may not have noticed this tidbit: In the fight against ISIS, the good guys are winning.

The Islamic State, as we all know, is the group attempting to establish a caliphate in Iraq and Syria using shockingly barbaric tactics. For a while, ISIS was dominating the news. Lately, it has reappeared in the public consciousness through periodic acts of terror, including three London attacks in the past few months.

Those kinds of events make the front-page headlines, as well as they should. But the bigger picture is this: Iraqi forces supported by Americans and allied forces have all but defeated the Islamic State in Mosul, its last remaining stronghold in that country. As of this writing, a few hundred ISIS fighters control only a small part of the city, and the jihadists were reduced in recent days to dispatching women as suicide bombers. Meanwhile, in Syria, Kurdish-led forces – also supported by Americans and other allies – have surrounded ISIS in its self-proclaimed capital of Raqqa.

ISIS – along with the belief system it tries to spread – remains a threat, and it may be impossible ever to declare victory over it because it will reappear in other forms. Still, the momentum is clearly moving in a positive direction. It controls very little land now, numerous leaders have been killed, and the tone of its propaganda has shifted from arrogance to desperation. Remember Mohammed Emzawi, the black-clad British citizen who coldly beheaded his captives while taunting the West in online videos? He met his Maker in November 2015 thanks to American and British drone strikes.

Given this latest news, Americans should at least acknowledge the success that’s occurring through efforts undertaken under both Republican and Democratic presidents. While the end of World War II was marked by jubilation, there also were moments of nationwide encouragement during the war, such as the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima. These days, good news doesn’t enter the public conversation, and when ISIS is finally squashed, it seems likely we’ll have already moved on to the next crisis, real or imagined. The poet Carl Sandburg once wrote, “Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come.” These days, it might be said, “Sometime they’ll win a war and nobody will notice.”

It’s not just the war against ISIS. It seems rarer and rarer for Americans these days to acknowledge anything positive happening anywhere. This obliviousness to good news ignores the facts and insults those who have sacrificed themselves for noble causes. Worse, by creating an unhealthy contempt for our democratic institutions, it threatens our way of life more than ISIS ever has.

A free society depends on truth, and the truth is that some of the news these days is encouraging. Just a few examples: In late 2015, the World Bank forecasted that less than 10 percent of people worldwide were living in extreme poverty, defined as subsisting on less than $1.90 a day. In the past few decades, hundreds of millions of people have escaped destitution. Meanwhile, technological advances and cleaner fuels have allowed the United States to approach energy independence after decades of relying on undemocratic, untrustworthy countries. Nationwide, the overall violent crime rate has dropped significantly, from 747 cases per 100,000 individuals in 1993 to 373 in 2015, according to FBI statistics reported by the Pew Research Center. Violent crimes, particularly murders, increased from 2014 to 2015, but the rate is still lower than it was. Property crimes are down long-term, too. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate in Arkansas is at a historically low 3.4 percent. Granted, those numbers do not take into account people who have left the workforce. Still, the economy is certainly better than it was during the Great Recession.

The comedian Louis C.K. put it this way in a 2008 interview with Conan O’Brien while talking about the technological wonders of modern life: “Everything is amazing right now, and nobody’s happy.”

In the bigger picture, maybe everything’s not amazing, but it’s better than terrible.

Anyway, it could be much worse. We could be a civilian in Mosul or Raqqa. Or we could be a member of ISIS, surrounded or perhaps having already met our Maker.

 

State’s top Democrat: Stop ‘screaming about Trump’

Rep. Michael John Gray, D-Augusta, says Arkansas Democrats must focus on core issues such as health care, poverty and roads.

By Steve Brawner
© 2017 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Michael John Gray can trace his family’s farming heritage in Woodruff County to the year after the Civil War ended. This being Arkansas, it’s a fair assumption that all those generations before him were Democrats. But then, the rest of the state back then was, too.

Gray, D-Augusta, finds himself part of a vanishing breed in the Legislature – rural, white Democrats, which describes somewhere between eight and a dozen of the 135 legislators, depending on how you define “rural.” It wasn’t long ago that it described virtually the entire Legislature, but now Democrats mostly represent the state’s urban areas and those with high minority populations. Overall, Democrats compose only 24 of the 100 members in the House of Representatives and only nine of the 35 senators.

Gray is trying to reverse his party’s fortune as its newly elected state chairman, but he said it’s challenging when the national party is focusing on the wrong things: special elections and “the absurdity of the presidency.” Since President Trump’s election, Democrats nationally have lost four special elections, all in traditionally Republican districts. Democrats poured $25 million into the campaign of Jon Ossof, who was trying to swipe a Republican seat in a Georgia district that almost voted for Hillary Clinton last year. It was the most expensive House election in American history. In the end, Ossof did worse than she had done.

Gray said Democrats created unreasonable expectations in districts they traditionally have lost. The story could have been how they almost beat the Republicans on their home fields. Instead, it was that the Democrats lost again.

“Drop $30 million in Arkansas, and I have a fair shot at changing the face of the Legislature,” he said.

If Democrats are to change their party’s recent trajectory, they’ll have to learn lessons from places like Gray’s district, which voted for President Obama in 2012 and for the Democrats’ Senate candidate, Conner Eldridge, in 2016. But it also voted for Trump rather than Clinton.

Gray said the presidential election showed there’s a disconnect between working class Americans and the party’s base. Meanwhile, he said Democrats are “screaming about Trump” when they should be talking about crumbling roads, children going to bed hungry, and senior citizens who “have to choose between eating pet food or paying their light bill.”

And of course, there’s health care, which national Republicans are struggling mightily to change with a bill polls show is unpopular. In Arkansas, Democratic Gov. Mike Beebe’s administration implemented the private option, the program now called Arkansas Works that provides health insurance for 300,000 Arkansans. It happened in part thanks to young, creative Republican legislators. But Gray said it was made possible by Obamacare, a fact Democrats haven’t communicated well.

Those kinds of issues are important, and Arkansas Democrats like Gray are comfortable talking about them. First, however, they have to get people to listen, which can be difficult when hot-button social issues grab so much attention. Recently, Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez said being pro-choice on abortion is “not negotiable,” a hardline position that brought objections from even liberal leaders including Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Gray disagrees, too, saying abortion should not be a litmus test. Meanwhile, he said Democrats should argue their policies will lead to fewer abortions by helping the poor and increasing access to birth control, rather than the Legislature passing abortion limitations that later are ruled unconstitutional.

Meanwhile, things happen like the guy knocking down the Ten Commandments monument at the Capitol. Gray said he “immediately cringed” when he heard the news – first, because it’s a terrible act, and second because he knew some would blame the actions of the disturbed driver on “the intolerant left.”

“We’ve got to find a way to quit feeding that story a little bit,” he said.

Can Democrats change minds, or at least move the conversation away from the issues that hurt them in a religiously conservative state to the issues that might resonate in a poor one? Gray said it won’t be easy and it will take time. But clearly, screaming about President Trump isn’t working.

“Nothing that’s been good has been built by tearing something else down,” he said. “It has been from building on what you have, and I think that’s what we’ve got to refocus on a little bit.”

Health care and the 10 Commandments: Two monumental stories

By Steve Brawner
© 2017 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Sometimes news stories are important, and sometimes they are mostly just eye-catching. It’s important for news providers to offer both if they want to stay in business. It’s important for news consumers to understand which is which, and when a story is both, and why.

This week was a good illustration.

On Tuesday, something important but not particularly eye-catching happened. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (see, I’ve bored you already) announced that the Senate health care bill doesn’t have enough support to come to the floor, so he’s delaying action.

Health care is perhaps the country’s most vexing domestic issue. The system has been on an unsustainable path for decades. What Congress decides to do about it is literally a life and death matter.

But Americans know politicians will argue and posture about this issue forever, and it’s been pretty clear for a while Republicans aren’t ready to repeal Obamacare, much less replace it. So I’m doubting McConnell’s decision was the lead topic of conversation at dinner tables and baseball fields across Arkansas.

Wednesday’s top story, on the other hand, was definitely eye-catching. The day after workers installed a controversial 10 Commandments monument at the Capitol, a mentally disturbed individual knocked it over with his Dodge Dart, leaving it broken on the ground.

That’s a heck of a visual, and it followed a long process that involved passing the legislation authorizing the monument, a commission determining its placement, hearings where satanists argued for their own statue of a goat creature named Baphomet, and a pledge by the Arkansas chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union that they would sue to take it down. After all that, it stood for less than a day.

I didn’t monitor every conversation at dinner tables and baseball fields across Arkansas, but I suspect more people were talking about this than were talking about Mitch McConnell.

But was it important?

Not as a statement in the country’s never-ending culture war, on either side. The driver is not an agent of supposed liberal intolerance, nor is this the fault of the monument’s outspoken opponents. On the other hand, he is not a hero for religious liberty or a defender of separating church and state. He instead is a seriously disturbed individual with a history of mental disorders who allegedly committed the same crime against a 10 Commandments monument in Oklahoma. A guy who has heard voices in his head telling him that he will be abducted by a UFO is not on either team.

But this part is important: We are a nation of laws.

Hours after the monument was destroyed, the sponsor of the legislation creating it, Sen. Jason Rapert, R-Conway, told reporters that the private organization that funded it, the American History & Heritage Foundation, had already ordered a replacement, possibly with some protective barriers. Money is being raised, and it’s possible the driver’s insurance will help cover the cost, he said.

That’s good news. Regardless of what you think about the 10 Commandments monument, we should all agree its fate shouldn’t be based on the whims of a disturbed individual. The proper way of deciding its future is through the courts, which will determine if it’s an appropriate historical marker or an unconstitutional government establishment of religion.

There’s also this. We live in a world where mentally ill people have easy access to very dangerous things such as assault weapons and 6,000-pound vehicles. That combination can do a lot of damage before authorities or bystanders can act.

We must prevent these people from doing great harm to themselves and others. Public policies must balance the rights of mentally imbalanced individuals with the need for society to protect itself. Meanwhile, the health care system must be part of the solution. It must provide better mental health services.

However, as we all know, it’s hard to change the health care system. Did you see where Mitch McConnell delayed a vote on the Senate health care bill? That was really important.

History and health care

By Steve Brawner
© 2017 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

History repeats itself, and, as we’re seeing with health care, that includes recent history.

In 1993, newly elected President Bill Clinton put the first lady in charge of fixing health care, and the next year the Republicans took over the House and Senate and gained 10 governorships. In 2009-10, newly elected President Obama and the Democrats passed the Affordable Care Act, and then Republicans gained control of government in Arkansas and virtually everywhere else except cities and the big blue states.

Now, newly elected President Trump and Republicans in Congress are trying to pass a health care bill – without any support from Democrats, who are salivating at the prospect of that issue sinking Republicans the way it previously sank them.

The latest Senate effort to repeal and replace Obamacare is called the Better Care Reconciliation Act, but you’d better believe that Democrats are calling it Trumpcare. That effort got some bad news Monday when the Congressional Budget Office said its passage would lead to an increase of 22 million uninsured Americans by 2026. That’s about the same as the American Health Care Act earlier passed by the House – the one that only 16 percent of Americans called a good idea in a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.

Because Democrats are an automatic no, the Senate version cannot survive if more than two Republicans vote against it. Things can change quickly in politics, but as of this writing more than two are expressing serious misgivings. Even Arkansas’ Sen. Tom Cotton, one of 13 senators who helped draft the bill in secret, hasn’t said if he’s definitely for it, and neither has Sen. John Boozman, though it’s hard to see either bucking the party in the end. If it does pass the Senate, it still has to be reconciled with the House version.

Just looking at the politics, you might wonder why elected officials don’t just ignore the issue. Unfortunately, health care is too big to do that. It’s 18 percent of the economy and growing faster than inflation. Premiums are rising, and insurers are pulling out of markets. Costs have risen so much for so long that policymakers vaguely pledge to “bend the cost curve” because it’s too much of a reach to say “spend less.”

In other words, health care is so big that elected officials must at least pretend to try to solve it, and when they do, they’re probably going to get punished for it. That’s because they cannot provide what voters expect – unlimited care for everyone with no bad outcomes at a negligible price and with no effort on our parts beyond taking a pill, which had better go down easy. Americans expect health care to be cheap if not free, but they don’t want the government to run it, and they don’t particularly like the insurance companies, either. You know the old saying, “Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die”? It’s just as accurate to say, “Everybody wants great health care, but nobody wants to pay for it.”

Meanwhile, the problem of exploding costs could be lessened if Americans simply made healthier choices. A recent Arkansas Center for Health Improvement study of 69,000 state and school employees found insurance plans spent far less in 2015 when employees were not obese or exercised regularly. In fact, the plans spent almost twice as much for employees who said they exercised fewer than 20 minutes per week – $6,043 each – as those who exercised moderately three times a week or vigorously once a week. Those employees cost their health plans only $3,345.

Health care won’t be “fixed” by any bill hatched in secret at the U.S. Capitol – not by Republicans, and not by Democrats. But one potential bright spot in the House and Senate bills is that they offer more flexibility to the states, which offer 50 laboratories to experiment with partial solutions. One such experiment, begun in 2013 and now called Arkansas Works, uses taxpayer dollars to buy insurance for poor people rather than enrolling them in a government program. It insures 300,000 people – more than were expected, so now Governor Asa Hutchinson is seeking to modify the program by adding a work requirement and lowering the income eligibility threshold.

Experiments like Arkansas Works should be encouraged. Good or bad, someday they will be the history others can learn from.

Extra cash for highways?

By Steve Brawner
© 2017 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Arkansas does not have Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains, but it does have the Ozarks and the Ouachitas. It does not have Elvis’ Graceland home, but it does have the birthplace of Johnny Cash. Unlike Tennessee, it does not have $2 billion to play with, but, like Tennessee, could it also find hundreds of millions of dollars for highways?

The question is asked after the Arkansas Highway Commission voted June 7 to pursue a ballot initiative for 2018 to raise up to $400 million a year for road construction.

That was step one of about a thousand. Forgive this run-on sentence, but the Commission and supporters such as the Arkansas Good Roads Foundation would have to decide on a specific proposal, obtain the attorney general’s approval, raise money to collect 67,887 voter signatures, raise money to defend against the inevitable last-minute legal challenge, raise money for the campaign, and then win the campaign.

The Highway Commission took this step because it’s tired of waiting on the Legislature and Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who have talked some about highways but not made them a priority. Funding for highways has been mostly flat for decades as spending for other state needs has increased significantly. Arkansas voters did approve an interstate bond issue in 2011 and passed a temporary half-cent sales tax in 2012, and last year Hutchinson cobbled together $50 million in state funds to make the state eligible for $200 million in federal ones. But the Highway Commission and the state Department of Transportation say that’s not enough.

One reason for the shortfall is the primary highway funding mechanism, the motor fuels tax, has not increased at the state level since 2001 and at the federal level since 1993. While motorists are paying the same 39.9 cents per gallon that they were in 2001, road construction costs have increased. Meanwhile, cars have become more fuel efficient, which means we’re buying fewer gallons and therefore paying less in taxes.

The easiest way to increase highway funding is to raise fuel taxes, or at least index them to inflation, but polls have shown Arkansans oppose much of an increase, and those polls are backed up by what legislators hear personally from their constituents. Aware of public opinion, legislators said no this year to a proposal that would have asked voters to approve a wholesale sales tax increase on fuel. Meanwhile, efforts in previous years to direct various auto-related revenues to highways, such as sales taxes on car purchases, failed because of opposition from other interests who depend on those revenues.

Would voters be OK with higher fuel taxes if they received a tax cut elsewhere? That’s what happened this year in Tennessee, where the Legislature and Gov. Bill Haslam raised $350 million for highways primarily through a six-cent gasoline tax increase and a 10-cent diesel tax increase. At the same time, $410 million in other taxes were cut, including that state’s food tax by 20 percent.

The combination means Tennesseans will pay less in taxes while spending more on roads. Also, Arkansans will help pay for those roads when they drive in Tennessee and stop for gas.

Could Arkansas do the same? Unfortunately, not so easily. Tennessee has nearly $2 billion in surplus funds this year, while Arkansas had to cut its budget to bring it into balance. Meanwhile, Arkansas would need much higher taxes. To raise $400 million here, fuel taxes would have to increase 28.4 cents a gallon.

So unlike Tennessee, Arkansas probably could spend significantly more on highways only through increasing total taxes or cutting spending elsewhere, or a combination thereof. That’s politically very challenging, which is why elected officials haven’t done it. A legislative task force is combing through the tax code trying to make it simpler, potentially creating room for tax cuts by ending some deductions. In the process, it might find more money for highways. But its recommendations won’t be considered by the full Legislature until 2019, and there’s no guarantee any will become law.

About half the states have increased fuel taxes in the past five years, including five this year. States know they can’t wait for money for Uncle Sam, who has his own problems. Will Arkansas join them, or find other ways to fund highways? It could happen, but it won’t be easy in a state that’s home to Johnny Cash but not much extra cash.