Huckabee rebuts Club for Growth

Huckabee is gracing the cover of the current edition of National Review "Another Man from Hope" by Byron York), and the article provides Huckabee's rebuttal to the Club for Growth's charges (here, here)that he is weak on economic issues:

"The area where Huckabee has encountered the most flak from conservatives is taxes. In the week before the straw poll, the Club for Growth spent nearly $100,000 to run ads portraying him as a profligate taxer and spender. “There once was a governor from Hope, Arkansas, who raised taxes like there was no tomorrow,” the ad began. “Who is that liberal tax-and-spend Arkansas governor? Bill Clinton? No. It’s Mike Huckabee.” Specifically, the Club for Growth hit Huckabee for, among other things: supporting taxes on Internet sales and access; signing sales-tax increases on gas, cigarettes, and nursing homes; opposing repeal of the sales tax on food and medicine; and allowing a 17 percent sales-tax increase to become law. “All of those allegations have pretty much been debunked, repeatedly,” Huckabee tells me. For example, “I have always staunchly opposed any tax on Internet access. I am adamantly opposed, always have been. For them to say anything otherwise is an outright lie.” As for the Internet sales tax, Huckabee argues that he supported proposals — also supported by other Republican governors — to let states collect sales taxes on goods sold on the Net by out-of-state vendors. “It’s simply a way to create a level playing field for taxes for Internet merchants as well as Main Street merchants,” Huckabee says. “It wasn’t a new tax at all.”

On the gas tax, Huckabee points out that Arkansas’ interstate highways were in terrible shape — among the worst in the nation. In 1999, the legislature approved an increase in the gas and diesel taxes, and Huckabee, who believed the increase was a good idea, signed the measure. Along with the gas tax, there was a $575 million bond issue for further improvements, which was put to a statewide vote in June 1999 and passed by a landslide, 80 percent to 20 percent. “I would argue that we did rather well on that.”

On the grocery tax, Huckabee stresses that he “philosophically” supported its repeal, but he felt that in the money squeeze that beset Arkansas in 2001–02 the state couldn’t afford it. “It was not that I philosophically opposed [repeal], because I have always philosophically supported it,” Huckabee tells me. “The only thing they’re going to hit me for is that I opposed it in the 2002 election, because I knew that we had already made deep [budget] cuts, and if you cut the grocery tax, there was no way to make it up.”

The biggest tax increase during Huckabee’s tenure was the sales-tax increase, which went to education, and it began not with Huckabee but with the Arkansas supreme court. In 2002, the court ruled that the state’s system of funding its schools was unconstitutional and ordered the state government to come up with ways to spend more money on education and distribute it more equitably among the state’s school districts.

Huckabee had to do something. And with a heavily Democratic legislature, it was a sure bet that more money was going to be raised and spent on schools. So along with a tax increase, Huckabee attempted to fix Arkansas’ amazingly chaotic school-district system. The state has 75 counties, and at the time it had 310 school districts, each a separate fiefdom with its own budget and bosses. Some school districts had as few as 100 students in K–12. Huckabee wanted to consolidate districts so that each would have a minimum of 1,500 students. He lost that fight, with the legislature choosing to make the minimum size 350 students. Still, that meant the consolidation of the smallest districts, with significant savings for the state. Even so, when the bill got to Huckabee’s desk, he declined to sign it, knowing that it would become law anyway. “I thought that we were not pushing for the level of efficiency that we should have,” he says.

So what does his record add up to? Well, the charges have not, as Huckabee claims, been pretty much debunked. Some of them are true. But Huckabee also cut taxes on several occasions, and he argues that, in contrast to the senators who want to be president, he was the man in charge who had to make hard decisions. “Unlike the federal government, governors don’t get to print money,” Huckabee tells me. Besides that, a number of his actions were undeniably popular with most Arkansans, with Huckabee working to meet the state’s needs while hewing to conservative principles."

York goes on to describe Huckabee's seal of approval from Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform, and from FAIR tax supporters. Read it for yourself . . .

Incidentally, the Club for Growth's original "white paper" on Huckabee is here.

See also at WisdomisVindicated.