BRIAN CHILSON
OPINION
It’s not your prosperity Republicans care about
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eople may be suckers for agreeable fantasies, but when it comes to their government they prefer to believe the worst. That impulse explains the big media campaign by Americans for Prosperity to persuade voters that government leaders in Arkansas are taking their fine old state down to ruin. Democrats, see, have generally been in charge in Arkansas and the TV commercials are supposed to give a big lift to Republicans running for legislative seats and also those running for Congress, as if they needed it. The ads by Americans for Prosperity, a political nonprofit run largely by two of the three multibillionaire Koch brothers, says Arkansas state and local governments have driven up taxes and debt so high the past few years that people and jobs are fleeing the state. All of it is laughably and provably false, but people in every state, including Arkansas, tend to believe their taxes are higher than those in other places. Arkansans have believed that, even during all the decades when the state ranked dead last in state and local taxes per capita and out of sight
of the 49th state. Governor Beebe took umbrage at the commercials last week. The ads did ERNEST seem to fly in the DUMAS face of recent history. Arkansas’s unemployment and growth rates have been better than the nation and most nearby states. It is one of three states that have run surpluses rather than cutting services or raising taxes, although it did so thanks to President Obama’s 2009 stimulus program, which saved the state $725 million in Medicaid expenses over three years. Beebe pointed out that since he became governor in 2007 state taxes have been slashed a net of $730 million, mostly by lowering the sales tax on groceries from 6 to 2 percent. The AFP ads are nothing new. Lobby groups and people not in power raise the same issue decade after decade, often using the same suspect sources. The same dynamic occurs in nearly every state — taxes are always higher than other places, and the state will prosper if you lower mine.
The end of the Southern Strategy
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ome to think of it, things have been awfully quiet on the End Times front. Living in the South, one grows accustomed to hearing about a never-ending series of conspiratorial threats and eschatological panics. Prophetic fads sweep the region. It’s Satan worshippers one year, “secular humanists” the next. Subliminal messages are descried in popular music; supermarket bar codes harbor the Mark of the Beast; logos on boxes of soapsuds give evidence of corporate diabolism. Under President George W. Bush, a series of preposterously bad novels by evangelical authors Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins became huge best sellers. Dramatizing the Book of Revelation as an action/adventure melodrama like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Terminator” films, the books portray born-again American suburbanites as Jesus’s allies in an apocalyptic struggle against a U.N.sponsored “World Potentate,” who looks “not unlike a younger Robert Redford” and speaks like… Well, like Barack Obama, actually. Which I think explains something about
what appears to be happening in the 2012 presidential election. To an awful lot of white Protestant evanGENE gelicals across the LYONS Deep South especially, President Obama has become no less than a secular stand-in for the Antichrist — a smooth-talking deceiver representing liberal cosmopolitanism in its most treacherous disguise. Dislike of Obama has grown to cult-like proportions across the region. Statewide polls show the president losing by thunderous majorities. A recent poll by the Public Religion Research Institute highlighted in the New York Times shows that “among southern working class whites, Romney leads by 40 points, 62-22, an extraordinary gap.” In the Midwest, Obama leads among the same group. Subtract the African-American precincts, and the president might not win 30 percent of votes in states like Arkansas and Oklahoma. So is it all about race? Not entirely, no. Many of the same voters who see President
Still, it needs to be countered every time. But first, let’s acknowledge a small truth in the AFP ads. State taxes and debt did rise significantly from 1999 through 2006. But the governor who pushed all those taxes and new debt was Mike Huckabee, a Republican. He raised more taxes — three sales tax increases, a temporary personal and corporate income tax increase, motor fuel taxes, tobacco taxes, liquor taxes, a giant tax on nursing home residents, and others — and increased the state debt more than any governor in Arkansas history. The AFP ads, using figures from the business-oriented Tax Foundation, say Arkansas this year has the 14th highest per-capita tax burden in the country and a worse-than-average business tax climate. The Tax Foundation doesn’t rely on the actual taxes collected by each state; that’s too simple. It constructs a theory about taxes and formulas to implement it so that states with income taxes tend to look worst. If you add all the taxes actually collected by the state and local governments and divide the total by the population — you can do the numbers at home — Arkansas comes out not 14th but 47th among the states. All the surrounding states are higher. The Tax Foundation abuses poor states like Arkansas unmercifully. It says Arkan-
sas levies a 3-percent surtax on corporation income, a brief tax that the Democratic Arkansas legislature repealed in 2005. It assigns to Arkansas taxpayers a share of the mineral severance taxes collected in other states like Alaska, Texas, Oklahoma and Wyoming. See, since Alaska’s 22.5 percent production tax on oil and gas (thanks, Gov. Sarah Palin!) is paid by the producers and not by local people, the Tax Foundation assigns those taxes to people in other states, like Arkansas, that consume the petrochemical products. Florida levies a high sales tax but the Tax Foundation says tourists pay it so it doesn’t count as much of a per-capita tax for Floridians. You will note that states without income taxes show up as low-tax states in Tax Foundation rankings although the actual numbers show them as high-tax states. There is perversity in Americans for Prosperity using Tax Foundation formulas, which favor state governments like Alaska and Texas that get their money from high mineral taxes. The Kochs hate taxes on oil, gas and coal production, where they got their fortunes. They led the way in blocking Arkansas from levying a meaningful gas severance tax. Workers are the packhorses of the state and local government tax systems, and the Kochs, their brethren and the politicians they elect are going to keep it that way.
Obama as an African-born Muslim Socialist would very likely support, say, Condoleeza Rice. (Or think they would, anyway.) Nor, however, are their fears entirely irrational. Because if the polls are right — and a disinterested observer would have to say that professional pollsters have grown increasingly accurate at predicting recent contests — the 2012 presidential election may not bring about “The Rapture,” but it could definitely mark the end of a political era. Specifically, it doesn’t matter how badly President Obama loses the five Deep South states won by Alabama Gov. George Wallace in 1968 — along with, say, South Carolina, Texas and Oklahoma. Should he prevail in most of the nine “swing states” where everybody agrees that the contest will be decided, and where Obama currently appears to lead by strong majorities, the white, GOP-accented South will find itself politically marooned. Again. Richard M. Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” will have been dismantled and a new, moderately center-left Democratic coalition built by President Obama. For the first time since 1972, the Rush Limbaugh/Mike Huckabee wing of the GOP will find itself with no clear path to power. The existential shock would be considerable. Not since the 1960s, when successive civil rights laws overcame the region’s “massive resistance” and ended legal segre-
gation, have certain kinds of white Southerners experienced such anger and trepidation. Boo hoo hoo. Moreover, should Obama be successful in rebuilding the U.S. economy during a second term, and once voters grasp that “Obamacare” has liberated them from the fear of being driven into bankruptcy by medical emergencies, the new Democratic coalition could prove to have a kind of staying power not seen since FDR and Truman. The temptation for Southern Republicans would be to double down on the crazy, because “conservatism,” so-called, can never fail, only BE failed. Also because religious melodrama is really what an awful lot of them are about. That, and Koch Brothers money. They’re not actually conservatives at all, in the classical sense, but sentimental fanatics seeking to purge the nation of sin; adepts of “limited government” with their noses buried in women’s panty drawers; apostles of a lost Utopia located in a non-existent past. In that sense, fear and loathing of President Obama strikes me as a lot wider than deep; a fad, not an existential dread. They survived the Voting Rights Act; they’ll get over this. However, adapting to the new political reality may take some time. Too bad, because the nation needs a principled conservative party to check the follies of the anti-gravity left. Today, it hasn’t got one. www.arktimes.com
OCTOBER 3, 2012
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