Griffin speaks government reform
EL DORADO — Arkansas Lt. Gov. Tim Griffin gave an interactive speech about government reform at the El Dorado Civitan Club’s meeting Thursday.
According to the Arkansas State Constitution, his duties are to preside over the Senate with a tie-breaking vote, serve as governor when the governor is out of state and to serve as governor if the governor is impeached, removed from office, dies or is otherwise unable to discharge the duties of the office.
Griffin took the time to explain this as well as his non-specific roles as lieutenant governor of the state of Arkansas.
“In my role as lieutenant governor I’ve spent a lot time giving speeches talking about different ideas,” said Griffin. “I go around and express a lot about of what I feel like we ought to be doing, things I’m sharing with the governor and the legislature. The specified hours of the office are few. I focus a lot on the persuasion part.”
He said Arkansas tax dollars are spent the “old” way and while the money is available for innovative reform, “government is interested in the inertia of the past.”
“Innovation is hard to find in government. When we find it, we hold those people up because it’s rare. There are ton of things that go into pro-growth policies,” he said. “Let’s not just focus on incentives and pay people to come here. Let’s fix our policies so we don’t have to do that as much.”
Implementing policies on the state level comes with a cost and he said he thinks projections get in the way of real reform.
The lieutenant governor said, “I’ve started to see in Little Rock, just like in Washington, all of the things that we need to do have a price tag on the them. The budget guys are concerned that the revenues and expenditures match. Otherwise, we would be running a deficit.”
Griffin went on to give an example of how old policies should be changed, making “pro-growth” policies possible for the state.
“What I quickly realized is we were never going to get anywhere on major pro-growth policy changes unless we did something else. Occasionally we’ll have tax relief in Arkansas, which I’m all for and I think we need more,” Griffin said. “All you have to do is look at Texarkana to know that we need tax reform. Texarkana gets an income tax exemption. If our tax code is in such a state that one of our border cities has to have an exemption from the code that the rest of the state pays, doesn’t that make you question that something’s wrong with our tax code?”
Griffin states he’s “all for” the income tax exemption in Texarkana, but bold government reform could benefit the entire state.
“The tax reform that we currently have is to wait, see what the surplus is in the budget and then we sort of figure out we can afford to tweak the code. It’s always tweaking. You will never have financial surplus and resources to do massive, bold change unless something else happens,” Griffin said. “Almost none of the big, bold reform that we need to move the state forward to 2016 can ever be done unless we walk through one door that has one key. Without going through that we’re going to be tweakers. The door is government reform.”
He gave an example of how saving a portion of the general revenue budget and sizing the Arkansas against other states could push innovative reform.
“We don’t spend the money we take, the way we ought to. We have a $5 billion general revenue budget, give or take. Let’s say we take ten percent of that every year, $500 million. In any case, that’s a huge amount of money.” Griffin said. “Do you ever worry about Fed-Ex and UPS competing with each other when you go to bed? No. Why? There’s something called market forces pushing on them everyday, forcing them to innovate
and if they don’t do it, they die. Market forces do not exist in government as a general rule.”
The state has a moral obligation to spend the tax dollars Arkansans pay wisely, Griffin said.
Brittany Williams may be contacted at 870862-6611, extension 131 or by email bwilliams@eldoradonews.com.