OANH 8-12-26

Mike Drop, hosted by former Navy CEO, Mike Ridland. What is your take? Was it what you expected? Oh, it was the best thing ever. It was something I always wanted to do. If you show me a clear goal, I'm like, okay, I can do that. Master Chief. He's like, you realize there's about 1% chance that you make it through. 1%. That's all I need Master Chief. My platoon went home early, and I just went up to my chief, and I was like, I'm not going home. Turns out I'm staying. That's when we go to war. Yeah, I was like, okay, I could get used to this. Mike Drop, follow and listen on your favorite platform. It's time to talk about the important issues for the natural state. And there's only one place to turn for that. Opportunity Arkansas's Nick Horton. You can find Nick's work at Opportunity Arkansas.organtz. And good Wednesday morning to you. It is the 12th of August, 10 minutes after 7 o'clock. And now joining us as the founder and CEO of Opportunity Arkansas. Nick Horton is on the American Link Detection phone line. And Nick, good morning. How are you doing today? Hey, I'm doing great, brother. A slightly different time. I appreciate y'all being flexible. It's a big day around here in the Horton household first day in school. It is. We're scrambling getting ready, but everybody's ready for school. Excited for the kids to get back to school. And, of course, you need to pack your patience because that school line on the first day is always a mess. That's just the way it goes, right? Yes. Well prepared for that. Very good. Nick, as far as some of the business today, so on Monday this week, the Arkansas House and Senate education committees. They met jointly, and a personal education tax credit, which is separate from the EFA accounts, was brought up by Representative Brett McKenzie, and it was approved out of committee. And so can you explain what this is and how it would work independently of the EFA accounts? What is this personal education tax credit? Yeah, you know, from what I understand, and I just want to say right out of the gate here, I really appreciate Representative McKinsey and his leadership generally on education freedom. He was actually our top score on our scorecard last session of the vice chair of the House Education Committee, and it's been a longstanding champion of education freedom and creating more options for parents and kids in Arkansas. But from what I understand, and Toby, we were, you know, just for the record here, we were quoted as sort of... concerned about this idea in the state media because what it would do is it would really, I think potentially, and this would be a very negative thing in our view. it would siphon families out of the Education Freedom Program and route them through this education, tax credit, whatever they're calling it instead, at a much lesser amount as well. I believe it's something like $3,000 per student. That's correct. Yeah. That they would receive instead of, and it is important to note, because I think some on the left have misinterpreted this, shockingly. It would not be in addition to the Education Freedom Funds. It would be instead of. From what I've gathered from Representative McKinsey and folks that are supporting this, look, the Education Freedom Program, as we all know, and we've documented well on this show, Toby, it has been subject to more and more regulation, more and more rules. We're capping education, or rather transportation costs, and there's a concern that that's going to continue. And so we need to start thinking about alternative delivery options to make sure that families have more flexibility.

I agree with the intent of that, right? Like we have said and we'll continue to fight every single day for as long as it takes to keep the education freedom accounts program fully funded and as flexible as possible for families. But I don't think... We're just one year into this program being fully universal. I don't think now is the time to abandon ship. I don't think now it's the time to change course. We're going into year two. The rules, we oppose those. There are more than 400 public comments that oppose those from our Kansans. I think we're going to see, I'm really hopeful, and we're going to be involved in working in the legislative session. to try to roll some of those regulations and rules back and restore some of the flexibility for families. But that's what we should be doing. We shouldn't be abandoning ship or signaling that we're thinking about abandoning ship on the EFA program. We should be digging in and doing the hard work to fix the EFA program and make sure that it's working for families. So that's our position. Now, a couple questions here. So with this personal education tax credit, is that available to... to people going to public school, or would it not, would it not apply to someone going to a public school? It would not. In fact, don't quote me on this, because it could be wrong, but I think it's actually only for homeschool families. So this would be for homeschool families that don't want to deal with the bureaucracy and the regulation of the ESA program. They could get a much smaller amount. The ESA amount now is close to $7,000. This would be about $3,000. I think Toby, a couple other things I'll just mention that the concern us about this approach is, as you know, we're trying to get rid of our state income tax. Right. And we have consistently, over the last three and a half now, almost four years at Opportunity Arkansas, opposed new types of tax credits, exemptions, carve-outs like this, because the more revenue drain that we have from these types of proposals, the more difficult it's going to be. to get rid of and fully phase out our state income tax. The more revenue and programs and tax credits and all these things that are dependent on income tax revenue, the more difficult, the longer that road to zero is going to be. So that's a concern. And look, at the end of the day, again, I think it just goes back to we should be working to create a better ESA education freedom program every single day and not trying to find some sort of way around that, but doing the hard work to to restore the flexibility and make sure the user experience and the parent experience is as good as possible. Yeah, well, and obviously, we'll watch this. You know, it just was voted out of committee. Obviously, they'll deal with it. They would deal with this during the session, right? Is that when this will come up? They would. This is an interim study that they're doing. So they're going to have Bureau of Legislative Research, do some research about what it would mean and how much money it would take and how many students do they think would sign up and all that. And then I expect, yeah, I expect there will be some. conversation and legislation that comes out of this that will be considered during the regular session, which...

starts in January. Yeah, and obviously opportunity Arkansas will be all over that, and we'll be talking about it here on the radio show. On another topic, even though the ballot measure amendment has been thrown out for not having enough legal signatures, it appears the group behind this, Protect AAR Rights. They're asking to join the lawsuit at the Arkansas Supreme Court against Secretary of State cold gesture. Is the overall thought that the Supreme Court will back up the Secretary of State in this case? And does it matter that Protect A.R. rights wants to join the case? It doesn't matter. And I think, frankly, Toby, I don't think the lawsuit matters. I mean, these are folks who failed. They had lots of runway. They've had basically two years to get this petition put together and organize and gather signatures and get their ducks in a row. And they failed to do that. I just want to remind folks, I know we talked about this and touched on this last week. But as a reminder, these are some statistics from what they failed to do or errors that they made. with the petition process, there were 87 petition parts, which means pages. So 87 pages that they submitted that were not for the ballot measure rights amendment. They were for the education rights amendment. Okay, so almost 100 pages that weren't even for the correct amendment. There were nearly 28, almost 3,000 signatures for people who signed more than once. You can't do that, Toby. You can't sign the thing more than once you get one signature per person. There were 15 times that a notary had notarized a blank signature, a blank signature line. No signature, but a signature from a notary. So I could go on and on about this. The ballot title itself that was on the petitions that they were asking Arkansas to sign, turns out, didn't actually match. the language that was approved by the attorney general. So the entire thing is invalid. And I've seen folks, a lot of people on the left, obviously the media, even some folks who call themselves libertarians crying and kicking and screaming about how this is being thrown out on a technicality and this is nitpicky and we're going to file this lawsuit. Nothing, not a single piece of evidence that I just listed off, which has all been documented by Cole Jester's office, the Secretary of State's office. None of that is nitpicky. Those are the rules. That is the law. You do not get to turn in 100 pages of signatures for a different amendment and then kick and scream when those signatures get thrown out. I mean, that is the most basic concept, the basic rules in the world on this thing. And they just want to kick and scream and cry foul. And now they want to go because they failed to deliver. Now they want to court, as always, to bail them out. They can't get their ideas through the legislature. They can't get their ideas to the petition process. So what are they going to do? What the left always does when they can't get their way, they go crying and screaming to a judge. So the whole thing is ridiculous. I don't know. I have a better word for it than that. It's just completely ridiculous. And I don't think they're going to get their way, thankfully. And the people that can't follow the rules now want to rewrite the rules. And they want a judge to help them do it. And it's just completely. It's completely ridiculous. Yeah, I mean, look, the line in the sand has to be drawn somewhere, right? And you can't continue to move it because it doesn't, you know, it doesn't fit what you're trying to do. They call it moving the goalposts is what they call that. And so, yeah, at this point to see, obviously, I can't take up some resources as the Arkansas Supreme Court goes through this, goes through this case. We'll see what goes on. We did reach out to us, Secretary of State Cole Jester to come on, said he can't talk about it until the case is over. So one other thing. Well, you know, I'll talk, Toby.

I'll talk as much as you want. That's why we call you once a week, Nick. We're like, well, you don't want to talk. We'll find someone who will. So here we go. We were talking a little bit about income tax. We were talking about the personal education tax cut situation. I wanted to know. So just north of us in Missouri, the phase out of the income tax, a plan to phase out their income tax was on the ballot recently. It was voted down. And so, Nick, that's my question, is why did Missouri voters vote against the income tax phase? What didn't they like about the plan? I mean, it seems crazy to me to vote to keep taxes. And so what went on in this particular situation? Yeah, you know, it didn't just go down. It got shredded, lit on fire, doused with gasoline. I mean, it was, I have never in my life. Even the most left-wing ballot measure that I've ever seen in Arkansas can at least get 20 percent. This thing didn't even get 20 percent of the vote. Yeah. But here's the details. Here's the point. Here's why, Toby, to your question, nobody wants to raise their taxes. I've read over a dozen news stories about this, and I've not seen a single news story. Maybe it's out there, but I've not seen one. that mentioned this really important detail. So I'm going to read to you the actual language of the ballot title that Missouri voters were asked to vote on. Here's what it said. Okay. Shall the Missouri Constitution be amended to require legislative phase out of the individual state income tax based on revenue growth? And, and... authorize the expansion of sales and use taxes. And then a second bullet point and curtail constitutional limits on taxing goods and services. So there's the answer, Toby. I mean, I think it is extremely clear to me. It's very vivid on this. This was not a just repeal or a phase out or an elimination of the state income tax. This was a raising of taxes. pretty much across the board and a removal of a constitutional limit that Missouri has in their state constitution on the raising of those taxes. And so I thought of it, as I've dug into this and looked at it, this was a guarantee of Missourians' taxes going up with the promise of a future income tax repeal, hopefully. And so... It's pretty simple. Again, I don't know why I'm still surprised, Toby, but I'm sort of shocked that I haven't seen this in the news. All the headlines want to just say Missouri voters reject income tax repeal. Missouri voters want to keep their state income tax. No, Missouri voters did not want to increase their taxes across the board for the hope of a maybe potential someday income tax repeal. And they did not, they didn't want their taxes to go up immediately. And I don't blame them. As I've read this, Toby, I probably would have voted against this thing. And I'm certainly a big fan of getting rid of taxes. So this is not, for the record, I'll just say, I know we're out of time. But this is not what we're proposing here in the state of Arkansas. And I'll be the first to say, if this gets proposed here in the state of Arkansas, that there's some sort of plan to.

unwind the state income tax, but replace it with sales or property or some other form of tax increase, I'll be the first person in line to speak against it and try to kill it at the legislature. That's not what we need to do, and that's not what we're trying to do. But that's the answer. That's why it fails. Well, and some group, someone in Missouri did a good job getting that messaging now to the people that, hey, you know, this is what this is going to do. It sounds good on the front, but if you read the bullet points. ends up not working out for the citizens. So it does make sense that they vote it down. Of course, if you want to get all the information on what Opportunity Arkansas is working on, you go to the website, Opportunity Arkansas.org. You can also find Opportunity Arkansas on any of these social media sites as well. Nick, tell the kids to have a good school year, and we'll catch up with you next week, but appreciate you jumping on the show this morning. Hey. Appreciate you guys, as always. Thanks for being flexible. Have a great week. Start your day with the morning jolt of Drake Toll. Anywhere in the country. Your home for talking sports. The United States hockey team has four teeth left. What is LeBron James Legacy? Leonel Mess. 906 career goals is stupid. All of it. The Knicks. The Los Angeles Lakers. Aaron Rogers. Georgia football players. The Dolphins. The Mets. As it happened, when it happened. We'll talk all of it. Westwood One Sports Talk. Your home. for Drake Toll, follow and listen on your favorite platform.