Here are excerpts from recent editorials in Arkansas newspapers:
The Jonesboro Sun. July 21, 2017.
A recent Jonesboro City Council meeting got heated when a resolution, drafted by the Arkansas Municipal League asking Gov. Asa Hutchinson to call a special session to address sales taxes of goods purchased online, was brought up.
Currently, the only purchases that require sales tax to be collected are by retailers with a physical presence in our state. Arkansas residents are “supposed” to report all other purchases, those where sales tax is not paid, to the Arkansas Department of Finance and Administration. Failing to do so is technically tax evasion, or so Mayor Harold Perrin stated.
The world has changed. More and more people are shopping online. Some might say it’s for convenience, but the underlying reason is that the internet is the new low-cost retailer. Not paying sales tax gives an out-of-state online retailer an immediate advantage, selling items for 8 to 10 percent less than our local brick-and-mortar stores.
Is that fair? We say no.
Here’s why. Our point is highlighted not necessarily by the mere cost advantage, but where that savings is not going. It’s not going to help pave our streets, or collect our trash, or pay for police and fire protection. It’s not going to pay for those basic services that we depend on each and every day to maintain our quality of life.
Those sales taxes that online purchases avoid are doing more to damage than help our lives. Sure, not paying sales tax puts a few more cents in our individual pockets. Each purchase may seem like such a small thing individually, the result being we fail to see the cumulative impact.
That impact is based upon the need for our local retailers to be successful. Local retail is the lifeblood of Anytown, USA. Local retail, or the brick-and-mortar stores, are our neighbors, our friends - those whom we turn to if we need help.
We challenge you to go out to the Joe Mack Campbell Park and look for team e Bay or team Wayfair.com. Next time you have a cause worthy of solicitation, try finding someone at Alibaba.com to get a donation. Need an ad in your high school yearbook? Try finding someone over at Overstock.com. Good luck, because you’re going to need it.
The fact is, online retail may be the way of the future, but it’s a race to the bottom for Smalltown, USA, and eventually for Anytown, USA.
If we can’t change a consumer’s purchasing habits, which we’re not giving up on here at The Sun, then why is it these retail scavengers aren’t required to collect sales taxes that help pay for basic services? (Keep in mind, they’re not paying, only collecting from you and then remitting to the state). It seems simple to us and something that our federal government should be looking at rather than our states since this is a national problem, rather than a state problem.
If our state could collect more than $100 million in online sales taxes, perhaps our total statewide tax rate could be lowered. If the pie is larger, the burden should be lessened for individuals rather than increased. One thing is for certain, an out-of-state online retailer shouldn’t be given a price advantage based upon not having to collect and remit sales taxes while local stores do. There is nothing fair about that, and the sooner our state and nation comes to grips with this, the better.
Putting the onus on individuals to remit sales taxes for online purchases is laughable, as proven by the less than 100 people (out of tens of thousands, if not millions) that remitted sales taxes to DFA. The system needs to be changed, and sales taxes need to be collected for all types of local purchases. It’s fair and it’s vital to every community in our state.
Charging sales taxes for online purchases is not a tax increase. Councilman Bobby Long stated that a recent poll showed the majority of people oppose collection of taxes on online commerce. We bet that a super majority of people oppose a decrease in the services that their future declining sales tax collections would bring, and the shuttering of retail businesses because online retailers are given a built-in competitive advantage.
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Texarkana Gazette. July 22, 2017.
The news that the onetime beloved actor and former football star who became America’s most famous acquitted murder suspect will soon be out of prison drew a lot of attention.
O.J. Simpson has spent nearly nine years out of a maximum 33 behind bars in Nevada on a slew of convictions, including kidnapping and armed robbery, after he and others tried to forcibly recover some sports memorabilia Simpson claimed to own.
But Simpson’s biggest brush with the law had come in 1995, when he was found not guilty in the brutal slayings the year before of his former wife, Nicole, and another man, Ron Goldman. The case captivated the American public and was a staple on TV from the crimes to the verdict. Many believed he was innocent. But just as many thought he got away with a terrible crime. So much so that he was ordered to pay millions in restitution to the victims’ families in a 1997 civil case.
And when Simpson was arrested in 2007 for the sports memorabilia caper, there were a lot of folks who thought he got such a stiff sentence as much for the murders as for what the Nevada court convicted him of.
Again, to some that was a miscarriage of justice. Others decided it was justice delayed rather than denied.
Now he will be getting out. A parole hearing went in his favor, and he will be released in October. And yet again there is joy, and there is outrage.
Legal outcomes are beyond our control; other types, not so much. Simpson was acquitted of the double murder. He cannot and should not be punished for those crimes. He was convicted of the Nevada charges. He has served the time required on those charges and was granted parole. End of story. Simpson has been a celebrity for five decades. And he’s been infamous for the last 20 years. With any luck he will fade into obscurity when the prison doors swing open. No doubt he will be offered book deals, TV deals, speaking deals - maybe a film deal. Whether any of these comes to fruition depends on whether there is a market. And that will be up to all of us.
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Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. July 24, 2017.
He was a boatswain’s mate second class assigned to a repair ship in the U.S. Navy that fateful Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941. He knew how to obey orders and when to ignore them. The American military may one day use robots in action, but they’ll always have to have human minders. Just for this sort of thing.
Joe George’s bold action would save the lives of six of his fellow sailors caught in the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor on that date, which still lives in infamy. The phrase was used by a great president - Franklin D. Roosevelt - to describe that act of premeditated aggression.
Now, all these years later, another and very different president and commander in chief told Joe George’s story as he welcomed three survivors of Pearl Harbor to the White House the other day - two saved by Joe George of Arkansas.
It’s a story with a lot of heroes and at least one heroine - Joe Ann Taylor of Cabot, Arkansas, who’s Joe George’s daughter indeed. For she never gave up when it came to asking, even demanding, that her dad’s heroism be properly recognized. And now it has been, even if Joe Ann Taylor had to fight her way through an army of bureaucrats swathed in red tape to get her own mission accomplished.
The current president recognized Donald Stratton and Lauren Bruner at a ceremony at the White House, both of whom had been aboard the doomed battleship USS Arizona. “As Lauren and Don would tell you,” the president said, “they are here because one man, Joe George, stopped at nothing to save them. Joe George rescued six men that day. He is no longer with us but (we will) always honor and remember a man … whose courage knew no limits. His name will go down in history … . Joe Ann, thank you for inspiring our nation by telling the story of your father - a true patriot … . a man that goes down, really, in the history with the Arizona, and a total hero.”
And what a story it is. Amidst the flames, with his own smaller vessel, the Vestal, connected to a great ship that would soon go down in flames, Joe George began by following orders and cutting the lines to the Arizona. Just as he was ordered and indeed been trained to do. But then he saw the men atop one of the Arizona’s towers and couldn’t bring himself to cut the final line and send them to sure death. The very image of a fighting, brawling sailor right out of the storybooks, he wasn’t about to obey orders this time, not when his fellow sailors’ lives were at stake.
Grabbing a rope, he hurled it across the watery depths - once, twice, again and again till it finally snagged, caught, and somehow held. The already battered and burned sailors who’d been trapped moments before secured what had literally become their lifeline, and then, hand over hand, began to make their way across to the promise of safety. Dangling there 45 feet above the flaming waters, they somehow made it along the 75-foot-long weighted rope before the lines were finally severed. Talk about narrow escapes, they made it, if just barely.
Rescued sailor Stratton would write a memoir about the experience with the fitting title “All the Gallant Men: An American Sailor’s Firsthand Account of Pearl Harbor.” He writes in his own uninhibited style, throwing caution to the winds: “Had Joe George not stood up for us - had he not been a rebel and refused to cut the line connecting the Vestal to the Arizona - we would have been cooked to death on that platform. If anyone deserved a Medal of Honor that day, in my opinion, it was him. And I know at least five others who would second that.”
Joe Ann Taylor recalls her heroic father as a modest man who would have been surprised by the well-deserved honor he received at last:
“He wasn’t the kind of person who ever sought attention,” she says. “He’d be grateful, I’m sure, that somebody was recognizing his heroics.” As for her own reaction to all the fanfare of a White House reception, she says she’d found it “very moving and very inspiring. I’m enormously grateful that my father’s story is being told.”
Just as all of us should be grateful to her for seeing that it was told. At last.
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