Category Archives: Politics

Ross, Hutchinson explain their number one priority in education

If you could accomplish only one thing in public education during your time as governor, what would that be?

Democrat Mike Ross and Republican Asa Hutchinson were asked that question at the Arkansas School Boards Association’s Summer leadership Conference in Hot Springs Friday.

Ross touted his plan to expand pre-K classes for four-year-olds. Currently, free pre-K classes are available through the Arkansas Better Chance program for families making 200 percent above the poverty level. Ross would expand that to families at 300 percent. As the program is phased in, families making 400 percent of the poverty level would be eligible for the ABC program by paying a reduced rate of 50 percent.

Total cost of the plan would be $35 million a year. He said it would be funded through “revenue growth”

“If you’re a parent and you’ve got a four-year-old and you want them in a public pre-K classroom, there should be a desk for them regardless of your income and regardless where you live in Arkansas,” he said.

Hutchinson wants computer science to be offered in every public Arkansas high school in four years. He said fewer than one in 10 high schools currently offer it. Under Hutchinson’s plan, a high-level computer science class could serve as a math or science credit and potentially a concurrent college credit as well.

Total initial cost would be half a million dollars to train teachers, Hutchinson said.

Hutchinson said that if 20 percent of Arkansas students took computer science, 6,000 would leave school with that skill every year, which “could change the dynamics of this state for decades and decades to come.”

Could you spend money better than Congress?

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

It’s been 13 years since Congress and the White House balanced the federal budget. Could you do better in 20 minutes?

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), a Washington-based group dedicated to finding solutions to the country’s long-term debt problems, offers a budget-balancing tool for citizens, the Debt Stabilizer, at its website, crfb.org. According to the site, the Debt Stabilizer has been visited more than 600,000 times since it was created.

Users are given a series of choices to reduce the public debt from its current 78 percent of gross domestic product to a more manageable 60 percent by 2024. Historically, the debt has been 40 percent of GDP. At its current pace, it will reach 100 percent by 2035 and nearly 150 percent by 2050, according to the CRFB.

The public debt, currently $12.6 trillion, is the portion of the $17.6 trillion national debt that doesn’t include what the government has borrowed from itself, such as from the Social Security Trust Fund.

To reach 60 percent, you must come up with $4.84 trillion over 10 years using a combination of savings and increased tax revenues. That’s $1.54 million for every American man, woman and child, or about $6 million for a family of four. That’s how deep in debt we are.

The exercise shows the range of actual, difficult choices that would address the problem, as opposed to the much easier solutions many Americans mistakenly believe exist. Polls show Americans are aware the national debt is a serious issue. However, in a survey last year by the Pew Research Center listing 19 options for reducing spending, not a single one was favored by a majority.

Want to give it a shot?

The Debt Stabilizer starts with a page featuring unavoidable policy decisions, such as what to do about Afghanistan. Brief explanations are provided about the options. Eliminating war funding entirely after 2021 would save $820 billion. Choosing that gets you one-sixth of the way to $4.84 trillion.

The next page features a series of options regarding defense and foreign policy spending. Those include ending the military’s new Joint Strike Fighter plane, which is very late and far overbudget. You can either cut veterans’ benefits $50 billion, or you can increase them by $50 billion.

There’s an option to cut foreign aid by 25 percent – certainly a popular choice among Americans. A Kaiser Family Foundation poll last year found the average American believes foreign aid is 28 percent of the budget. It’s actually 1 percent. Cutting it 25 percent would save $150 billion.

The next page gives you a chance to cut various kinds of domestic discretionary spending – basically what the government doesn’t spend on defense, Social Security and health care programs. Want to create a moon colony? That would add $250 billion to the public debt. You can cut highway spending or increase it. Reducing food stamps to 2008 levels saves $140 billion.

The next pages cover Social Security, Medicare and the government’s health programs. Social Security and Medicare politically are very difficult to touch, as Rep. Tom Cotton is discovering in this year’s Arkansas Senate race, but together they are 38 percent of the federal budget. Leaving them completely off the table requires very deep cuts elsewhere and/or higher taxes.

By enacting all my spending cuts, I saved $3.5 trillion, which is apparently far more than the average American would choose. And yet as tough as I was, I still needed to find $1.1 trillion to stabilize the debt.

That means I had to increase revenues, which I did by increasing a few taxes, such as the gas tax to fix our roads and bridges, and by eliminating some big tax deductions. I saved $510 billion by gradually phasing out the mortgage interest deduction we all use, including me. That would be political suicide if I were running for office.

I more than met the goal. I lowered the 2024 public debt by $5.03 trillion, which would be 59 percent of the projected gross domestic product that year.

See if you can do better at crfb.org. Email me at brawnersteve@mac.com and let me know how it goes.

Hobby Lobby: Is a corporation owned by people still people?

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

You probably think this column is being written by a columnist. It’s not. Legally, it’s being written by a corporation, Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Steve Brawner Communications, Inc. – in the eyes of the IRS, an “S Corporation” – copyrighted the material, bills your news provider, and writes a paycheck to its only full-time employee, Steve Brawner.

Last week, the Supreme Court declared 5-4 that the federal government under Obamacare could not require another S Corporation, Hobby Lobby, to pay for insurance that covers four types of birth control for its employees – two interuterine devices and two types of the so-called “morning after pill” – because the family that owns the corporation considers those to cause abortions. The Court drew a distinction between public corporations with many stockholders and a closely held corporation owned by only a few people – in this case, founder and CEO David Green and his family.

Among the arguments opposing the decision, voiced by politicians and pundits, is that the Supreme Court has decreed that employers can force their religious beliefs on their employees.

That’s not even remotely what has happened. All the Supreme Court has said is that a closely held corporation should not be required to pay to insure forms of birth control that its owners consider to cause abortions. Hobby Lobby employees are free to purchase those services on their own or to go to work for a company whose insurance does cover them. Or they can take advantage of one of the 16 types of birth control that Hobby Lobby is willing to cover.

The federal government under Obamacare gave the Greens three choices: cover those services; don’t provide health insurance and pay an annual penalty of $26 million; or face annual fines up to $475 million, which would have put Hobby Lobby out of business. Hobby Lobby has 23,000 employees.

The Court specifically said the decision applies to “only the contraceptive mandate,” but in her dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote that the Court has waded into a legal minefield. Who could decide if one religious objection is legitimate while another can be ignored?

Ginsburg has a point. But that’s the thing about these hard cases – they’re hard. That’s why we have courts and legislatures, so we can tackle these issues one at a time, attempting to formulate general legal principles while also being flexible based on the facts of an individual case. Very few of us would argue that an employer could have a religious reason to practice racial discrimination, for example, but on abortion Americans are deeply divided. True, it was difficult for the government to accommodate the Greens’ religious beliefs, but does that mean it shouldn’t have even tried?

The mixed public reaction to this case is about more than Hobby Lobby, birth control, or even abortion. At its heart, it’s also about what people think about corporations, the people who own them, and the people who work for them. During the past few decades, Americans have watched corporations off-shore jobs and manipulate the political system to their advantage. It’s no wonder that many Americans identify more with the employee than the employer.

The Court does not see it that way. In its decision, it used some of the same “corporations are people” logic that it used in the Citizens United decision that removed limits on corporate political spending.

“A corporation is simply a form of organization used by human beings to achieve desired ends. … When rights, whether constitutional or statutory, are extended to corporations, the purpose is to protect the rights of these people,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the Hobby Lobby decision.

So if you start a company and then incorporate it, is it still an extension of you? Five Supreme Court justices say yes, and four say no.

I’m watching how this unfolds. Whatever the federal government can enforce regarding an S Corporation with 23,000 employees, it probably can do to an S Corporation with one.

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.