Our View

Our View

Keep politicians’ hands out of online commerce

State lawmakers will be back in Little Rock today — this time to wrap up the work they did during a recent session of the Legislature, and to the disappointment of greedy Little Rock municipal leaders word is Gov.

Asa Hutchinson isn’t expected to include a proposal to persuade out-of-state retailers to collect taxes on their sales to Arkansans.

During the session, the governor persuaded Amazon to voluntarily collect sales taxes on purchases made by Arkansans but a Senate bill by Sen. Jake Files, R-Fort Smith that was designed to persuade out-of-state companies without a physical presence in Arkansas to collect taxes failed in the House.

We’re told House Democratic leader Michael John Gray of Augusta, who voted for the Senate bill, is saying he doesn’t expect the bill to be on the call for the special session.

This attempt to gouge Arkansans for more taxes has been strongly encouraged by money-grabbing politicians in Little Rock who even went to the effort to push through a city resolution calling on state lawmakers to pass this tax law that would bring in revenues benefiting not only state coffers but every county and city throughout the state.

There is never an end to some politicians who are incapable of living within their means and being more efficient with what they already have to work with.

Seldom, if ever, is there any serious effort on the part of politicians in charge of our tax dollars to cut back or eliminate non-essential government services. All we usually hear during legislative sessions is the need for more tax dollars to either fatten up existing budgets or create new ones.

Arkansans already fork over a hefty share of their income on state, county and city sales taxes and to make them now pay taxes on purchases from out-ofstate e-commerce businesses is highway robbery.

As we’ve pointed out, Arkansans have no real issue with sales taxes being collected from businesses and retailers with brick-and-motar stores within the state.

The feeble argument these spenders of our tax dollars is that brick-and-motar businesses are being negatively impacted and are at a disadvantage.

The fact of the matter is that these very same brickand- motar retailers also are heavily involved in e-commerce and the real reason these greedy politicians want to sap us with more sales taxes is to fatten their government coffers to continue to fund their many wasteful and unnecessary programs.

Sadly, and unfortunately, this is just a temporary reprieve because knowing these politicians as we do there will be a opportunity in the future when there will be another effort to pass such tax legislation.

As of now though, when lawmakers convene this upcoming special session all we expect they will concern themselves with are the governor’s proposed changes to the state’s Medicaid expansion, called Arkansas Works, for which he plans to seek waivers from the Trump administration. Lawmakers will also correct anything they did during the regular session during this brief three day session.