“And the Huckster never proposed lowering taxes or reducing the size of the Arkansas state government, merely expanding it and increasing taxes ...”
The Cato Institute disagrees:
“Perhaps no current governor has been elevated to the statehouse under stranger circumstances. Huckabee, a Baptist minister, was elected lieutenant governor in 1994. Two and a half years later, Clinton’s heir, Jim Guy Tucker, was convicted of a felony as a result of the Whitewater investigation and was immediately removed from office. In the midst of those tumultuous events, Huckabee became the first Republican governor of Arkansas in recent memory.
“Upon taking office in July 1996, Huckabee immediately backed a 1/8-cent sales tax hike to fund the Games and Fishing Commission and the Department of Parks and Tourism. The voters enacted that hike as a constitutional amendment in November 1996. In his first budget, however, he redeemed himself by proposing a sweeping overhaul of Arkansas’s archaic income tax system. The $80 million tax cut package was enacted in 1997 and became the first broad-based state tax cut in more than 20 years. It increased the standard deduction, eliminated the income tax ‘marriage penalty,’ and indexed the state tax brackets for inflation.”
Lipstick on a pig - those reforms were well on their way to maturity in the inherited budget that Huckabee had when he took office. Again, no sale.