Lawmakers head to Arkansas Special Session
Governor Asa Hutchinson has called a special session for Tuesday August 9th. The governor tells 40/29 News, the special session will focus largely on the $1.6 Billion surplus and how to provide relief for Arkansans during current inflation. The governor joined 40/29 News this Sunday on 40/29 News On the Record. He says the hope is to come up with tax cuts to impact Arkansans as soon as possible.,”that way, people can immediately see a change in their take home pay if they make the adjustments and so we want to accelerate our individual tax cut so that we reduce it to 4.9%. Effective immediately this year, and we would lower also the corporate income tax that would help businesses. We would accelerate these tax cuts. And And we’d also as part of this, we want to make sure everybody gets some benefit, so we would have a $150 individual tax credit for those that are making $87,000 and below.”We asked about the hesitancy over a possible upcoming recession. He tells us, “legislators or anyone else that’s concerned about next year and if we have a recession, we have with these tax cuts even with those we’ll be budgeting a surplus. And we have $1.6 billion in reserve that will be spent down some but we’re going into next year with the largest surplus in the history of Arkansas. No governor has turned over the next administration $2 billion in reserve funds.”He says he hopes “the general assembly set aside $50 million of this surplus funds for a grant program that our schools can tap into to help them cover some of the one time expenses for some of these school safety and security needs that they have. There’s going to be other costs that will be involved if you have more school resource officers if you have more armed personnel in the schools that cost money. These are ongoing expenses and that will have to be a jet address next January in the regular session.”
Governor Asa Hutchinson has called a special session for Tuesday August 9th. The governor tells 40/29 News, the special session will focus largely on the $1.6 Billion surplus and how to provide relief for Arkansans during current inflation.
The governor joined 40/29 News this Sunday on 40/29 News On the Record. He says the hope is to come up with tax cuts to impact Arkansans as soon as possible.,”that way, people can immediately see a change in their take home pay if they make the adjustments and so we want to accelerate our individual tax cut so that we reduce it to 4.9%. Effective immediately this year, and we would lower also the corporate income tax that would help businesses. We would accelerate these tax cuts. And And we’d also as part of this, we want to make sure everybody gets some benefit, so we would have a $150 individual tax credit for those that are making $87,000 and below.”
We asked about the hesitancy over a possible upcoming recession. He tells us, “legislators or anyone else that’s concerned about next year and if we have a recession, we have with these tax cuts even with those we’ll be budgeting a surplus. And we have $1.6 billion in reserve that will be spent down some but we’re going into next year with the largest surplus in the history of Arkansas. No governor has turned over the next administration $2 billion in reserve funds.”
He says he hopes “the general assembly set aside $50 million of this surplus funds for a grant program that our schools can tap into to help them cover some of the one time expenses for some of these school safety and security needs that they have. There’s going to be other costs that will be involved if you have more school resource officers if you have more armed personnel in the schools that cost money. These are ongoing expenses and that will have to be a jet address next January in the regular session.”
