Aiding the poor (wink, wink)

The state’s Republicans haven’t made much of a peep about my column Tuesday. That was the one on how they manipulate the state’s poor people with misleading percentages. They do it to assert phony and inordinate benefits for low-income people from the GOP’s vaunted proposals for state income-tax cuts.

Then, with state taxes cut, the Republicans are left to explain that, darn the luck, we just won’t be able to expand Medicaid for health insurance for the working poor. It’s a one-two: Republicans hit the poor people with a left and then a right—while smiling and talking sweetly, of course.

Actually, I got a smidgen of Republican pushback. State Rep. David Sanders argued that things can be better all-around in income-taxless Tennessee than in income-taxed Arkansas even if, as I noted, a higher percentage of Tennessee’s people than Arkansas’ is unemployed. Employment and unemployment are two different things, Sanders said, which was one of his truer pronouncements.

His point was that Tennessee has created more jobs than Arkansas in recent months.

It also has more people. It also has more unemployed people.

Sanders argued that you assess an economy by the jobs it creates rather than by the varying monthly unemployment rates. I would just as soon live in Arkansas as Tennessee and have a statistically better shot at a job even with some state withholding tax on the paycheck.

And I am not alone in seeing no pattern at all among the 50 states suggesting that the existence or nonexistence of state income taxes bears on job creation. The factors are much more numerous and complex, having to do with topography, geography, transportation, natural resources, higher education, work-force readiness, history and luck.

Generally, the Republican hesitance to fight over that column may have to do with something else: There’s an even bigger and better example of their proposing to clobber the poor while talking about doing them a favor.

It’s in the state Republican platform, adopted last weekend. It says there that the Republicans want to do away with the state income tax altogether and construct a different and “more equitable” tax system. Look out. One rich guy’s equity is one poor man’s microscopic end of the stick. The income tax, while widely reviled, is the fairest tax in that well-to-do people pay most of it and poor people very little.

Don’t think that’s fair? Consider this choice: Would you prefer to have a high income and high taxes or a low income and low taxes?

You could earn $7,800 and pay only 2.5 percent. You could earn $150,000 and pay 7 percent on the part over $32,000. Put a pencil to it.

So, conversely, as I demonstrated Tuesday, across-the-board reductions in income-tax rates deliver the greater bonanza to richer taxpayers while delivering relative peanuts to the poor ones. Doing away with the state income tax altogether would compound that unfairness. You’d take a poor man from a few hundred bucks in state income taxes to zero and you’d take a rich man from $15,000 or more in state income taxes to zero.

You’d put a couple of filled grocery carts in the poor man’s pantry and a new party barge on the dock at the rich man’s lakehouse. Eliminating the income tax altogether and replacing it with some nebulous new system of supposed equity is just about the single most unfair tax policy the state could impose.

But it might be even worse than that.

It turns out that, unnoticed, the Republican platform of 2010 had this same provision—eliminating the income tax altogether—except that it didn’t refer to a nebulous new system to be put in place of the income tax. No, it got specific.

It proposed offsetting the incometax elimination by raising the state sales tax, which is still applied in part to a poor man’s groceries. The poor man just went from two carts of groceries to a cart-and-a-half.

That provision was continued in a draft of this year’s platform that was posted for a month on the state Republican Party’s website. But then the Republicans took out this candor and went with the reference to the more nebulous and euphemistic pursuit of a new and more equitable system.

For the record, there’s not a Republican in sight—and I’ve asked several—who will even venture a guess as to what a new and more equitable tax system might entail. Mostly Republican legislators deny their own platform, saying they only want to lower the income tax and make it fairer, not, as their official document says, eliminate it. Rep. John Burris of Harrison said that a platform is just broad planks, so don’t worry about it.

In the meantime, it would be best to remember a few things: Cutting income taxes across the board is mostly about helping rich people. Raising the sales tax is mostly about gouging the poor, and the middle class, too. Doing both at the same time is such a brazen move you probably ought not to put it in writing.

And if you put it right there in writing in 2010, and got away with no one noticing, then you need to be able to locate the delete button.

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John Brummett is a regular columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com.