As I mentioned in the newsletter we sent out at the beginning of this week, the Extraordinary Session of the Arkansas General Assembly would likely happen very quickly. It did move quickly, though it lasted about one day longer than most legislators expected. And that’s where it got interesting.
The newsletter from Monday also talked about the balance between different policy goals that all governments must strike. When it came to the balance between the public’s right to know what their government is doing and concerns about safety and efficiency, many legislators and members of the public thought the initial proposed changes to Arkansas’s FOIA law didn’t strike the right balance. As our policy analyst Joyce Ajayi explained in an op-ed on Monday, as well as blog posts on Tuesday and Wednesday (co-authored with our policy analyst Joseph Johns), the initial bills didn’t just address the Governor’s personal safety, but also would have severely reduced state government transparency in other ways. A bill was ultimately passed (SB10), but it was significantly slimmed down to only directly address issues related to safety and security.
The bill to reduce income taxes that I discussed last week in a blog post had a much smoother path to acceptance by the legislature (the bill is SB8). Starting in 2024, over 1 million Arkansans will now pay lower income tax rates (down from 4.7 to 4.4 percent for the top rate), and most Arkansans will also receive a $150 credit on their 2023 taxes. These changes continue the process of making Arkansas competitive with neighboring states, but, just as important, it will more closely restore the balance between taxes and state government spending.
And here’s a preview of something else coming up soon on taxes from ACRE: within the next month we will be releasing an updated book on tax reform in Arkansas, once again co-published with the Tax Foundation. This book will assess all of the tax changes in Arkansas since 2015, including this special session, and offer concrete plans of how to further reduce taxes in Arkansas. We’re excited for that book to be published, and we hope you are too.