Out of the piggy bank
Ataxpayers will always remit in a fiscal year an amount of taxes exceeding that which state government spends in that fiscal year.
That’s because state law forbids deficit-spending. To keep from running the risk, the state keeps cutting its budget along the way if its collections run short, all the while piling up cash balances at the end of every month because it can’t budget to the dollar every month, and it dare not go over.
If state government budgets conservatively from the get-go and then hits an economic boom, then the overage can be substantial.
Now, with that much established: Neither the federal nor state criminal code specifically says that, if state taxpayers remit more money in a fiscal year than the state spends, then state legislators may not divvy up the overage among themselves and throw it at vague and lame notions and personal play-pretties that aren’t required to submit records or show their work.
Federal authorities are considering the recent-year behavior of legislators in this regard—through what they call the General Improvement Fund in a process the Arkansas Supreme Court has now ruled unconstitutional. These federal authorities have relied thus far for criminal charges only on evidence they think they have of laundered kickbacks of portions of money that individual legislators sent to favored recipients before those recipients routed some of the money back.
Former state Sen. Jon Woods of Springdale goes on trial April 9 for an alleged scheme in which he is said to have sent money to a supposed little college in his region called Ecclesia, after which some of the money wound up with a consultant to the college, who then, it is alleged, facilitated the transfer of another portion back to the original favoring legislator.
But just taking your GIF share and giving part of it to old boys in West Memphis who say they’re going to build a transitional house for three or four homeless veterans, to get them off the street and back on their feet, and then having it turn out four years later that the old boys bought only a small existing house and that it houses no once-homeless veterans and that they’ll get back to the project if and when they get more money… well, that’s just rotten luck on good intentions, one supposes.
Former state Rep. Fred Smith, who made the grant, told this newspaper last week he’d had no idea the project hadn’t gone as planned.
One thing those well-intended might do next time is jump through all hoops necessary to interest either the federal Veterans Administration or the state veterans’ affairs agency in such a worthy undertaking— rather, that is, than getting a local legislator to give them a quick, easy and unaccountable $60,000 from his GIF piggy bank.
That way, the well-intended might get more and real money with more and real accountability and the taxpayers might get more bang for their overages.
And even imagine—homeless veterans might get a place to stay.
And a state legislator might attract less attention from pestering reporters like Lisa Hammersly of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. She reported the foregoing and other GIF curiosities beginning on the front page last Sunday.
If you like irony, you might notice the liberality with which professed conservative legislators like Sen. Bart Hester of Cave Springs and Koch brother dominance throw around your overages for groups that otherwise might be expected to … you know … take care of themselves without government dependence.
Hester favored $50,000 on something called Eagle Family Ministries, which, according to the article, helps married couples bond more strongly, in part by hauling them to Branson for making-time-for-romance getaways. The people hauling troubled married couples to Branson happen to go to church with Hester.
That’s what entitles them to your excessive tax remittances, apparently.
Hester is the one—or the main one—complaining about taxpayer money subsidizing the Arkansas Educational Television Network. Yet here he sends your money to help an organization facilitating whatever those two are doing to perk up their marriage behind those closed doors in Branson.
Not a public penny for Downton Abbey, but a few public thousand for a little fresh kindling in the bedroom … perhaps that’s the current conservative mantra.
It’s unclear from any of that what kind of criminal indictments there might be. I’m inclined to suspect none.
But what’s plenty clear is that our legislative politics has been breathtakingly hypocritical—liberal with your money while conservative with its words.
The legislative culture has been somewhere between ridiculous and corrupt.
Here’s what I’d do with the overages: Keep letting them pile up as long as they last for a rainy-day fund for the day when these same professed anti-government conservatives cut state taxes so severely that we’ll need the money to keep kids in school five days a week.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@ arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.