Death, taxes and Lake View

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

We’ve all heard the old Benjamin Franklin adage that the only certainties in life are death and taxes. For many years Arkansans have been able to add “public schools getting more money” to that list.

That’s because of a series of 1992-2007 court decisions in a case initially filed by the Lake View School District, a small, poor district in the Delta. Those decisions clarified that the state has a constitutional responsibility to ensure schools everywhere are adequate and equitable. The decisions basically required the state to fund schools first without regard to how much money was readily available or how it would affect other state priorities.

Since then, any debate about public school funding started and ended with two words: “Lake” and “View.” Nobody has wanted a repeat of that experience, where judges, justices and special masters stood over the state’s shoulder making sure it was filling in all the circles to their satisfaction.

As a result, while other states have cut education funding, Arkansas has always increased it – not by much lately, but by at least enough to stay out of court. In fact, the state’s public school districts not only have enough to fund their operations but between them have saved up $790 million in their net legal balances. A bill filed this legislative session by Rep. Mark Lowery, R-Maumelle, would require districts to keep no more than 20 percent of their revenues in those balances and use the rest for other purposes.

This year, as in years past, a legislative committee decided months ago that schools would receive an increase – this time about 1 percent in total per pupil foundation funding, the primary way schools are funded. Under that so-called adequacy report, whose recommendations the full Legislature generally accepts with little debate, in 2018 each school district will receive $6,713 per pupil, and that’s not including numerous other sources of local, state and federal funding that pushed the cost of educating each Arkansas student to about $9,400 as of 2013, according to the Census Bureau.

That’s right. If you have two kids in school, you’re getting about $19,000 worth of government benefits every year, and that’s before you drive on a road, call a fire department, get help with your parents’ health care costs through Medicare and/or Medicaid, or are protected by the military and law enforcers.

Anyway, back to Lake View, which is very slowly exerting less control, as evidenced by the fact that the 1 percent increase was less than it used to be, for a lot of reasons. One, naturally, is that the longer something fades into the past, the less it’s remembered, and there aren’t many policymakers left in Little Rock who were serving when all those Lake View decisions were coming down from the courts. Meanwhile, some state expenses have continued to rise – a good example being health care – at the same time that schools have always been guaranteed a raise. Plus, legislators always want to cut taxes, and that’s harder to do when you always must spend more money on schools.

Finally, there’s this really, really important fact: There are no Supreme Court justices left who had anything to do with those Lake View decisions. The last, Justice Paul Danielson, retired after the 2016 elections. No other justice has been on the court longer than since 2010, so no one knows how they would rule if Lake View were to be reconsidered. For what it’s worth, some of those justices have ruled in one 2012 case, Kimbrell v. McCleskey, that went a little against Lake View by saying certain school districts that collect extra money through property taxes can keep them rather than share them with other districts.

So schools have gotten a lot of money for a long time, other needs must be addressed, legislators always would love to cut taxes, and a whole new cast of policymakers remember less and less about Lake View, and are less scared of stepping past the vague line it drew in the sand. Plus, lawyers can make some pretty good money suing the state over this stuff.

So here’s a prediction and another certainty. The prediction is the state will wind up in another school funding case eventually.

The certainty is that it won’t be called “Lake View.” That district was forced to consolidate with Barton-Lexa in 2004 and no longer exists.

How can an unhealthy nation fix health care?

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

You may have noticed that a while back, a Democratic president and a Democratic-led Congress tried to fix health care, and while more people do have health insurance, health care costs are still rising. You also may have noticed that a Republican president and a Republican-led Congress now promise to fix the fix. It won’t work either.

The truth is that no health care reform can create an affordable system in an unhealthy nation.

Modern American life, in fact, is profoundly unhealthy. Americans eat too much and eat the wrong things: too much sugar, fast “food” and processed conglomerations with unpronounceable ingredients; too few fruits, vegetables and healthy protein sources. We stay up too late bombarding our brains with flashing electronic lights rather than getting the sleep we need. We drive everywhere, take elevators up one flight of stairs, and spend most of our days sitting, which research has shown is very bad for us. We are addicted to all kinds of drugs – caffeine, opiates, alcohol. Then we try to fix all of this, quickly, with short bursts of exercise that often injure us, and with diets we cannot maintain, and with pills that have harmful side effects.

But it’s more than just about what we put into and take out of our bodies. We are disconnected from nature and from the natural rhythms of life. We are replacing healthy personal interactions with shallow distant relationships and unproductive disagreements on social media. We are fueled by a sense of outrage triggered by 24-hour media sources that might as well be plugged into our brains. We seek “more” rather than “enough,” filling our lives with stress and worry, flitting like gnats from responsibility to responsibility, and climbing ladders that are leaning against the wrong buildings.

And then after all of that, we think our members of Congress and a president are going to create an affordable, workable health care system, just because they happen to be members of a certain party?

The costs of our lifestyle were illustrated in a recent report by the Arkansas Center for Health Improvement. As reported by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, state and school employees and spouses were given the opportunity to save $75 on their insurance premiums if they completed a survey. More than 69,000 did.

It found that health insurance plans spent $4,302 in 2015 on employees and their spouses who were obese – 43 percent of the respondents – compared to $3,270 on employees who were not. The costs of obesity, in fact, were significantly higher than for those who smoked tobacco, who averaged $3,703. The plans spent an average of $6,043 for employees who exercised fewer than 20 minutes per week, compared to $3,776 for employees who said they exercised moderately at least 20 minutes just once a week. Those who exercised moderately three times a week or vigorously once a week cost their health plans $3,345.

No study tells the whole story, of course. Some people don’t exercise because they already have health problems, perhaps through no fault of their own.

Still, these are large differences in a sample size of more than 69,000 people. The difference in costs between those who exercise very little and those who exercise not that much was almost $2,700 a year. That one habit almost cut health care costs in half.

The United States has by far the most expensive health care system among the industrialized nations. According to the World Bank, the country spent $9,403 in 2014 per person on health care. Health care costs accounted for more than 17 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, compared to an average of 12.3 percent among all high-income nations – a number that we skew upwards.

As the study of 69,000 Arkansans makes clear, healthier lifestyle choices would make us a lot healthier as individuals and significantly reduce the nation’s health care costs, which is the key to increasing access to everyone. Think of what could be done with that extra money now spent on taxes, insurance, and the costs of preventable health problems.

You can’t overcome the actions of 300 million people with a legislative act. Regardless of what elected officials do, if we’re going to reform health care, we’re going to have to reform ourselves.

When Democrats should vote for Republicans

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

A couple of thousand mostly Democratic-leaning participants gave Sen. Tom Cotton an earful last week during his rowdy town hall meeting in Springdale. While civic engagement is good (and civil discourse would be even better), most of those folks would accomplish more by voting in the Republican Party primary.

That’s because, for the foreseeable future, Arkansas is going to be a mirror image of what it’s been for much of its past, and that’s a reliably one-party state. After 150 years of being dominated by Democrats and a brief period from 2008-12 when it was competitive, the state will be ruled by Republicans for a while, if not the rest of most of our lives.

Cotton knows this, which is why he was willing to endure an uncomfortable couple of hours that will not change the way he votes. He knows the people who took their shots at him represent a fraction of the state’s voters and were not going to vote for him anyway.

Most parts of Arkansas are dominated by one party at the state and national level – mostly the Republicans except in urban areas and parts of eastern Arkansas with high minority populations, which are decidedly Democrat.

That reality means we don’t have competitive races hardly anywhere. In the 2016 elections, President Trump beat Hillary Clinton 61-34, none of the congressional races were close (and only one even featured a Democrat), and only seven of the 41 competitive state legislative races were decided by less than 10 points, five in the Republican candidate’s favor. Three of those seven involved a Democratic incumbent losing to a Republican challenger.

So each May, Democratic voters in a lot of places may have to make the same choice some Republicans used to have to make: Voting in the other party’s primary for the candidate they can live with, and then voting in the general election for the doomed candidate they want – assuming their party fields a candidate.

Moving forward, the most important divides in Arkansas politics often are not going to be between Republicans and Democrats but between Republicans and other Republicans on an issue by issue basis. To use one example, at the national level, there’s a very real difference between how Cotton sees trade with Cuba (continue the embargo) and how Sen. John Boozman and U.S. Rep. Rick Crawford from the agricultural 1st District see it (open it up some).

At the state level, a number of issues are determined not by what the two parties argue about, but by which Republicans occupy Republican-dominated seats. A big issue this legislative session has been a proposed tort reform constitutional amendment that would cap the amount of punitive and noneconomic damages awarded in lawsuits. Democratic legislators are completely against it, and presumably so would be most of the attendees at the Cotton rally. But the issue has also split Republican legislators, some of whom oppose the proposal. Health care is on the back burner while everyone waits to see what happens in Washington. Once there’s more clarity there (whenever that happens), there’s going to be a huge fight at the State Capitol, often pitting Republicans against other Republicans.

If this sounds like I’m offering unsolicited advice to Democrats – I’m not, although somebody surely should. This message is for anyone of any persuasion who wants their vote to matter most. Aside from very important ballot initiatives like medical marijuana and tort reform, the state’s political direction will be decided at least as much in May party primaries as in November general elections. In fact, in Arkansas, that’s pretty much the way it’s always been.

By the numbers, 645,000 Arkansans voted in the 2016 primaries while 1.1 million voted in the general election, a difference of 500,000 people.

No doubt much of that was driven by the presidential race, which was a foregone conclusion in Arkansas in November but still competitive in May. As a result, in a state with 1.7 million registered voters, Trump won the Republican Party primary (and inevitably its six electoral votes) because 134,744 voted for him then, while the rest were voting somewhere else, for someone else, or not at all.

Those 134,744 voters had a lot louder voice than anyone at a town hall, it turns out.

Could Democrats become states’ rights party?

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

People tend to think about how things work in relation to how well they’re working for them. That’s why some Democrats, who’ve won the popular vote but lost the electoral vote in two of the last five elections, want to get rid of the Electoral College, while many Republicans say it’s a pillar of democracy. If the results had been reversed, so would have been the arguments.

Which leads us to the 10th Amendment, sometimes known as federalism or states’ rights.

The 10th Amendment states, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.” As the national government has grown in recent years, it has been the most ignored amendment outside of the 18th, the one that prohibited the sale of alcohol, which was repealed by the 21st.

Some conservatives have called for bringing back the 10th Amendment, particularly during the last eight years when they didn’t like what the federal government was doing. They say states have different cultures, economies and histories and should be able to enact policies that fit themselves. Moreover, states should have the freedom to be laboratories of democracy, where ideas are subject to experimentation and then can be copied, modified or rejected by other states and the federal government.

Democrats have looked skeptically at returning power to the states, largely because the idea of “states’ rights” has been used to justify racial and other types of discrimination, including in Arkansas. Moreover, moving power to the states would make it harder to enact sweeping programs at the federal level, such as Obamacare.

But now here’s what Democrats, particularly in blue states, are facing. President Trump occupies the White House and leads the executive branch, and he has already nominated a Supreme Court justice who will give conservatives a 5-4 majority. Among the four “liberal” justices, Ruth Bader Ginsburg is 83 and Stephen Breyer is 78, while the sometimes swing voter, Anthony Kennedy, is 80. By the time Trump leaves office, the Court could have a conservative tilt for decades to come.

Republicans also control the House and the Senate. True, Democrats could take back the Senate in 2018, but they would have to overcome two challenges. First, Republicans tend to do better in midterm elections because their older, more conservative voters vote more often. And second, Democrats have more to lose next year. Of the 33 Senate seats up for grabs, eight are held by Republicans and 23 are held by Democrats, while the other two seats are held by independents who vote with Democrats. Ten Democratic senators are running for re-election in states carried by Trump in 2016.

Democrats also face another problem with the national map: where they live. Democrats tend to cluster in big cities while Republicans are spread across the country, which is why Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 3 million people but lost the election, and why there are more red states than blue ones. Demographic changes – an increasingly more diverse population in many parts of the country – have been expected to counteract this, but they obviously didn’t in 2016.

The result of all this is that some blue states, particularly California, are really getting the short end of the stick, and will continue to do so. With more than 39 million people, California’s population is almost as large as the 22 smallest states combined, including Arkansas. The people of those states have 44 U.S. senators between them, while Californians have two. It’s no wonder California is a donor state, meaning it sends more money to Washington, D.C., then it gets back. And it’s no wonder that there’s a growing movement among Californians to try to secede from the union. In fact, blue states tend to be donor states across the board, while red states tend to be receivers.

So could Democrats, particularly in big blue states like California, embrace returning some power to the states? If states had more power, President Trump would be less important, his secretary of education couldn’t tell people how to run their schools, and blue staters could keep more of their tax dollars.

So we’ll close with two questions. First, will Democrats give the 10th Amendment a try, now that they aren’t in charge of any part of the federal government?

And second, will Republicans turn their backs on the 10th Amendment, now that they are in charge of all of it?

Cotton the populist

Sen. Tom Cotton

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

Sen. Tom Cotton made a name for himself because of his combat service, support for the military, opposition to the Iran deal, and fierce criticism of President Obama. These days, he’s talking a lot about a top issue in the 2016 presidential campaign – immigration, and not just the illegal kind.

Cotton has expressed support for the president’s border wall with Mexico and for his refugee policies, while also raising the ante by introducing the Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment Act.

Cotton’s RAISE Act would reduce the number of legal immigrants admitted into the country from more than 1 million in 2015 to a little more than 500,000 by the act’s 10th year. It would do so by eliminating preferences for some adult family members, eliminating a lottery system that is supposed to increase the diversity of immigrants but which Cotton says really doesn’t, and limiting the number of refugees to 50,000 per year.

Cotton’s argument is that immigrants are creating surplus labor, driving down wages in low-skilled jobs and making it harder for certain Americans (including the immigrants who are already here) to get ahead. As long as a new immigrant is willing to work a job for subsistence wages, then that’s what the job will pay. It’s a pretty good deal for corporations that profit off cheap labor, Cotton says, but not for blue-collar Americans.

These are not brand-new stances for Cotton, but they and other bread-and-butter issues are getting more emphasis since you-know-who was elected president. On Feb. 16, Cotton criticized the high cost of a prescription drug on the Senate floor by saying, “We should be channeling people’s ambition and entrepreneurial spirit into finding cures, not finding new and clever ways to make a profit.” It wasn’t long ago that few Republicans would ever use the word “profit” negatively in any circumstance.

For decades, the Republican Party has been composed of an increasingly awkward alliance between big business interests and culturally conservative Americans. Those two groups’ interests are not always aligned economically, particularly for Americans without a college degree, who have not recovered much in this economic recovery while the rich have gotten a lot richer.

In election after election, Republican candidates have bridged that gap by mixing pro-big business politics with culturally conservative stances on social issues, all seasoned with promises of tax cuts that everyone likes. The formula has worked particularly well among whites without a college degree. According to the Pew Research Center, John McCain won that group of voters 58-40 percent in 2008, while Mitt Romney, the ultimate big business elite candidate, won by an even bigger margin, 61-36.

In 2016, Trump ran a different kind of Republican campaign by appealing to those culturally conservative voters on both social issues and economic issues, helping him pick up just enough new voters to win key states. Trump ran as a populist, his message being that the common man is being hurt by the kind of “unfair trade deals” that big business Republicans (and big business Democrats) have often supported. As a result, according to the Pew Research Center, Trump won the votes of 67 percent of whites without a college degree versus only 28 percent who supported Hillary Clinton, a bigger spread than in 2012 or 2008. That gap is one reason he won 107,000 more votes than she did in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, just enough to make him president.

It’s a potent formula in certain parts of the country, including Arkansas. At the moment, Republican elected officials in those parts oppose Trump at their own peril. So we’re watching one of two things happen: either a historical anomaly that will correct itself in four years, or the transformation of a party as it better aligns itself with its own voters and potential voters. Democrats, who lost in 2016 after nominating a candidate who didn’t match their own voters’ mood, probably will undergo their own transformation in 2020.

The country’s already cynical enough, and I try not to add to that cynicism. Cotton’s recent emphasis does not equate to insincerity. I’m not saying his principles have changed, but it’s fair to say he has made an adjustment in his politics in the age of Trump.

So have a lot of other Republicans, and if they haven’t, they’d probably better.