Former Gov. Mike Huckabee (R-AR) will announce Tuesday that he plans to run for president in 2016 — his second attempt to win the Republican nomination. In his unsuccessful 2008 campaign, he called himself a “fiscal conservative,” signed Grover Norquist’s anti-tax pledge, and promised to replace all federal taxes with a flat national sales tax on all purchases. But one of the nation’s most visible fiscally conservative groups has lambasted his record over more than a decade as governor as demonstrative of “profoundly anti-growth positions on taxes, spending, and government regulation.”
“He is not a conservative, certainly not a fiscal conservative,” said prominent Arkansas businessman and conservative activist Jackson T. “Steve” Stephens Jr., who chairs the Club for Growth.
Huckabee boasts that during his tenure, he cut taxes 90 times — including a 30 percent reduction in the state’s capital gains tax (which impacts corporations and investors). And presidential candidate Huckabee signed onto a “Fair Tax” proposal to eliminate the Internal Revenue Service and replace all federal taxes with a sales tax on all goods and services — an idea even conservative critics say would cause “an enormous shift in the tax burden from the wealthy to those with lower and middle incomes.”
But Stephens told the National Review that Huckabee’s record as Arkansas Governor was predominantly one of tax increases, not reforms.
Stephens’ Club for Growth, an anti-tax tax-exempt political group with a multi-million dollar annual budget, has run anti-Huckabee ads highlighting his embrace of a wide array of tax increases, including support for increases in income, sales, gas, grocery, tobacco, beer, Internet, and nursing home bed taxes — or at least opposition to cuts in those areas.
A December 2007 Club for Growth spot featured a May 2003 speech by Huckabee to the state legislature during a special session in which he supported various tax increases as a means of balancing the state’s budget, a requirement under the state’s balanced budget amendment. “There’s a lot of support for a tax at the wholesale level for tobacco, and that’s fine with me. I will very happily sign that. Others have suggested a surcharge on the income tax. That’s acceptable; I’m fine with that,” he told them, adding, “Others have suggested perhaps a sales tax. That’s fine. Yet others have suggested a hybrid that would collect some monies from any one or a combination of those various ideas, and if that’s the plan that the House and Senate agree upon, then you will have nothing but my profound thanks.”
Watch the spot:
Other attacks by the group ridiculed him as “Tax Hike Mike,” who “spends money like a drunken sailor.” A white paper noted Huckabee signed a 1996 sales tax hike, opposed efforts to reduce grocery taxes, and allowed a sales tax increase to become law in 2004.
In a 2007 Fox News Sunday interview, Chris Wallace noted that the criticism of Huckabee’s tax record was not just from the Club for Growth (which Huckabee dismissed as the “Club for Greed”): “The Cato Institute, another conservative think tank, gave you a ‘D’ on taxes for your ten years as governor. Americans for Tax Reform, another conservative group, said that state spending during your first eight years as governor increased by 65 percent.”
And while 2008 hopeful Huckabee embraced Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform pledge, five years earlier — after Norquist criticized his record of tax increases — the Arkansas governor slammed him as an un-elected activist who did not understanding the realities of governing. “What do our critics want — to rip the feeding tubes out of an 8-year-old or an elderly person on Medicaid?”
Now that he’s taking another shot at the presidency, Huckabee has made clear he will again push his consumption tax proposal, defending the move from a progressive system to a proportional one as “biblical” in inspiration and simultaneously decrying taxes as “a punishment” for citizens. But according to the New York Times, tax increases over Huckabee’s tenure as governor outweighed tax cuts by about $500 million. And the anti-tax forces that dominate today’s GOP have made it equally clear that they will do whatever they can to ensure that he does not win the nomination.