On immigration, are we more mature than first-graders?

tax, taxes, debt, deficits, spending, trillion, State of the Union, deficit hawks, balanced budget amendment, Jonathan Bydlak, immigrationBy Steve Brawner, © 2018 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Let’s say your family and another are getting together for a Friday evening dinner. You both have first-graders.

The parents are preparing the meal when the children enter the kitchen. Your child wants to play with dolls. Their child wants to play a game. They both want their way.

The best response is for the adults to guide the children toward an agreement. Perhaps they could take turns with the dolls and game, or maybe find an acceptable third choice. If one child refused to compromise and demanded his or her own way, he or she would face a consequence.

We teach our children that life is about give and take, but then we approach national politics like it’s a zero sum game. If you can’t have all you want, then no one should get anything they want, including you. When your side is right and the other is evil, then gridlock is preferable to compromise.

No other issue illustrates this better than illegal immigration, which this week eclipsed all others because now we’re confronted with kids being warehoused temporarily in cages. Continue reading →

The 3 percent rules

Arkansas Legislature, Arkansas Works, Jeremy HutchinsonBy Steve Brawner, © 2018 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

“Ninety-nine percent of this body are good, honest people,” said Sen. Bill Sample, R-Hot Springs, and I think his estimate is not far-fetched. But only 97 percent of the members of the 2013-14 Arkansas Legislature are not going to prison, and that percentage could shrink before all is said and done.

Sample, who was quoted in the Democrat-Gazette, was responding to the latest news to come from federal authorities’ corruption investigation. In federal court June 7, lobbyist Rusty Cranford pleaded guilty to bribery charges regarding two former legislators who themselves have pleaded or been found guilty, former Sens. Jon Woods, R-Springdale, and Hank Wilkins, D-Pine Bluff.

Those two are awaiting sentencing along with two others from that 2013-14 session, former Sen. Jake Files, R-Fort Smith, and former Rep. Micah Neal, R-Springdale. A fifth ex-legislator, Rep. Eddie Cooper, D-Melbourne, who served from 2005 to the beginning of 2011, has also pleaded guilty to financial wrongdoings. All of it is related to the state’s General Improvement Fund, a grant program directing state dollars to specific local projects at the behest of individual legislators.

None of that is news. The news was that Cranford told the court that another legislator had accepted $500,000 in bribes.  Continue reading →

Government by attorneys general

By Steve Brawner, © 2018 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

“All politics is local,” said the late Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill, and that may have been so at one time.

But these days, all politics is national. And no one understands that better than Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge and her fellow attorneys general across the land.

Rutledge occupies a state office – in short, she’s Arkansas state government’s lawyer.

But attorneys general can have a big impact on federal issues – in fact, a bigger impact than most members of Congress. Each of those is just one of 535 members of an institution that can’t get anything done anyway.  Continue reading →

Democracy’s laboratories

By Steve Brawner, © 2018 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

States often are described as laboratories of democracy, which is good because our democracy definitely needs some tinkering. These past few weeks, we’ve seen how three states in particular are running their experiments.

On Tuesday, California held its “top two” party primaries. Republicans, Democrats, and all other candidates appeared on the same ballot, and the top two finishers advanced to the general election regardless of party label.

Why do this? Under the traditional primary system, like in Arkansas, voters choose between participating in the Republican and Democratic primaries. Nationwide, these tend to attract low turnouts composed of a disproportionate share of partisan and ideological voters. As a result, the winners tend also to be partisan and ideological, or at least pretend to be.

The consequence has been a Congress composed heavily of conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats, with a void between them where statesmanlike compromise is supposed to occur. Without a healthy center, Congress gets stuck in gridlock, unable to accomplish even its most basic responsibilities such as passing a budget. The top two voting system theoretically would help remedy this by forcing candidates to appeal to the broader electorate, including voters in the center, assuming there still are some. Continue reading →

Listening to Eeyore in boom times

By Steve Brawner, © 2018 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

There’s been a lot of supposedly good economic news lately, which means someone needs to be that guy – the Eeyore guy. Eeyore is needed to balance out the Tiggers.

In case your “Winnie the Pooh” is a little rusty, Eeyore is the pessimistic donkey who sees the cloud in every silver lining. Tigger is the optimistic, enthusiastic tiger who bounces around and is pretty full of himself.

I bring up those two characters in light of this week’s announcement that Arkansas state government is enjoying a $44.2 million surplus this fiscal year with one month to go, and has collected about $160 million more than last year.

That’s good news, and it comes amidst a prosperous national economy – indeed, a global one. We are now in the midst of the nation’s second longest economic expansion on record, though records don’t go back far. This expansion began in June 2009 in the bottom of the Great Recession. If we make it to July 2019, it will become the longest.

But economies that go boom eventually go bust, and so will this one. In the foreseeable future, the expansion will run out of steam and then we’ll be in a slowdown, or something bad will really shock the system like the banking crisis of a decade ago. Continue reading →