OPINION
Setting the Dem-Gaz straight
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or every complex human problem rest, but the fable that low or nonexistent there is an answer that is simple, taxes are the secret to prosperity and hapattractive — and wrong. When H. L. piness endures. The 2014 governor’s race Mencken made that observation he might got underway with the three Republican have had Arkansas in mind because he candidates promisoften did when he was most cynical. ing to slash income Back when Mencken was celebrating taxes and maybe Arkansas as the land of ignorance, Arkan- even do away with sas had the nation’s lowest taxes. Actually, them. When the its leaders could boast of its spectacularly Democratic canERNEST low taxes and the country’s best business didate, Mike Ross, DUMAS climate from statehood in 1836 until a said he was not quarter-century after World War II. You going to cut taxes if it impaired services know where it got us. Last place in nearly like schools, colleges, prisons and medical everything. services, the four programs that consume Our taxes were so much lower than three-fourths of the state’s general taxes, those of all the other states that the fed- he was hammered not only by the Repuberal government in 1934 ended federal aid licans but by the statewide newspaper. for food relief and education in this one One more time: The history of tax cuts state until it levied taxes to help the feds and increases do not support their theory feed half the population that was starving. — not in the United States, not in Arkansas. The federal government had been paying One example should suffice. Republican Arkansas teachers their pittance because presidents and congresses slashed taxes the state could not. Fearing riots, the leg- four times in the 1920s. What came next? That fine Republican Winthrop Rockislature and Gov. Futrell put a penny sales tax on some foodstuffs and taxed liquor efeller saw the flaw in the theory. Arkansas and beer. would forever trail the rest of the country, You might think that our own example he said, as long as it did not invest in good across 140 years would put the idea to schools and colleges, public health insti-
Race-baiting
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hen people call for a national “conversation” about race, what they really have in mind is a lecture. Sometimes President Obama is among them. So at the expense of alienating critical race theorists, some heresy: If the president wants to understand why he heard car door locks clicking as he walked down the street, he should study those two appalling homicides in Duncan, Okla., and Spokane, Wash., that Fox News is beating the drums about. Yeah, yeah. I know. Fox, Rush Limbaugh and the rest are race-baiting. It’s what they do. “Fox News Desperately Searches For The White Trayvon Martin” is how Media Matters put it. The ever-reliable Salon informed readers about “The Right’s Black Crime Obsession.” Both publications laid down the liberal party line: that what Salon condescendingly called the “conservative cri de Coeur” about the trio of Oklahoma teenagers who gunned down an Australian baseball player jogging through their neighborhood was essentially phony. Local police saw no racial motive. (Never mind that one of the two AfricanAmerican perps posted this on twitter: “90% of white ppl are nasty. #HATE THEM.”) Of course local cops saw no racial motive in the Trayvon Martin killing either, but hold that thought. There’s also the case of Delbert “Shorty”
Belton, an 88-yearold World War II veteran mugged in Spokane by two black teenagers who stole his wallet. GENE The victim’s family LYONS has understandably resisted attempts to turn Belton’s death into racial symbolism. No less an authority than the New York Times’ Timothy Egan — for whom I have great respect — lamented how quickly the crime “went from an all-toocommon tale of urban violence to a politicized narrative and magnet for racists.” “It is much easier to incite racial fear than to try to examine the mechanics of evil,” Egan explained. “Yes, blacks commit a disproportionate amount of the homicides in this country, and are disproportionate among the victims. Is that because of their race?” In a word, no. Me, I’m with Mark Twain: “I have no color prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. All I care to know is that a man is a human being, and that is enough for me; he can’t be any worse.” That said, special pleading by adepts of the Trayvon Martin cult strikes me as willful blindness. For more than a year, nearly every “mainstream” news organization in
tutions and services, highways and other programs that improved people’s lives and opportunities and made the state appealing to investors. He tried in 1969 and 1970 to raise tax revenues by 50 percent, including a top income tax rate of 12 percent on himself and a half-dozen other very rich men, but the Democratic legislature slapped him down. Over the next dozen years, governors took his message to heart and raised a few taxes, including the income tax. Sure enough, Arkansas improved its ranking among the states on nearly every measure of well-being. But that’s not the story the DemocratGazette editorial told to bolster the new Republican economic strategy. It is well established, the paper said, that cutting taxes increases government revenues. Common sense tells you no, but the paper said that was the history, at least “since John F. Kennedy lowered the capital gains tax and reaped higher revenues.” Then it said Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush all did the same thing with the same result — a surge in revenues. Kennedy didn’t cut any taxes. He proposed a reform of the tax code in January 1963 but he couldn’t pass it. Part of it was enacted three months after his death. It didn’t change the tax treatment of capi-
tal gains. Reagan cut income taxes in 1981, including a new low rate of 20 percent on capital gains. The country fell into the deepest recession since the 1930s, unemployment hit double digits for 10 straight months, revenues flattened for four years and deficits soared to the highest in history. In 1986, his overhaul of the tax code lowered the top rate on salaried income, raised —yes, raised — the rate on capital gains and generally raised taxes. Revenues improved, deficits fell. Clinton lowered the capital gains rate in the midst of a roaring economy. George W. Bush cut the tax rate on regular income and capital gains. What followed were massive deficits and the worst jobs-andgrowth decade since World War II. And Arkansas? In 1999, when Mike Huckabee exempted 30 percent of capital gains from taxes, did it cause a rush in state revenues? Income tax receipts had grown at a rate of 8.1 percent a year the three years before the tax cut but grew at only 2.4 percent the next three years. Then Huckabee pleaded with the legislature to raise income taxes for two years so that he could pay the bills. It did and he did. That’s the history. Everyone is entitled to his theory, but not to his own facts.
the United States portrayed young Martin’s death as the racial atrocity of the century — based largely on tendentious and erroneous reporting greatly influenced by the Martin family lawyers. Looking back, some of it continues to amaze. Bob Somerby recently analyzed an appearance by former prosecutor and CNN legal analyst Sunny Hostin in March 2012, as the publicity campaign to make Florida prosecutors charge George Zimmerman with murder neared its crescendo. Suffice it to say that virtually everything Hostin told CNN viewers about the evidence was shown to be upside-down and backwards at trial. She’d gotten nearly every dispositive fact about the fatal confrontation between Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin wrong. Not that it altered her opinion or anybody else’s as the trial went on to its inevitable conclusion. After the verdict, along came the professors and critical race theorists to further confuse matters. On PBS News Hour Professor Jelani Cobb (University of Connecticut) alleged that “the fact of the matter is, Mr. Zimmerman had called the police 46 times in the previous six years — only for AfricanAmericans, only for African-American men.” Sorry, professor, but The Daily Beast catalogued them. The actual number of calls involving black men was seven, two of them Trayvon Martin. Then came Professor Patricia Williams (Columbia University Law). Writ-
ing in The Nation, Williams objected to the racial “monsterization” of Trayvon Martin — describing how defense lawyer Mark O’Mara “dropped a huge chunk of concrete, bigger and more jagged than a cinder block, in front of the jury box — as though onto Zimmerman — from a great and death-dealing height.” Would it shock you to learn that this lurid episode never happened? Watch O’Mara’s closing argument on YouTube if you doubt me. Anyway, here’s my point: If we’re going to have a healing conversation about race and crime, it’d help if people would quit making wild exaggerations and accusations of bad faith. The differences between Fox News and MSNBC-style racial demagoguery are largely a matter of style. Ultimately too, the exact motives of the Oklahoma and Spokane murderers strike me as far less significant than their extreme brutality and near-suicidal indifference to human life. It comes in all colors, God knows. However, the statistics Timothy Egan (and President Obama) alluded to are stark: According to the Center for Disease Control, the youth homicide rate (per 100,000) is 28.8 for blacks, 7.9 for Hispanics, 2.1 for whites. Overall, the African-American homicide rate is eight times greater than the national average — an ongoing tragedy this bickering does nothing to heal. www.arktimes.com
SEPTEMBER 5, 2013
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