GREENVILLE, S.C. — Mike Huckabee on Friday defended the tax increases he presided over as governor of Arkansas, telling a business group here that the levies were approved by a strong majority of voters.
Just as during his first run for president in 2008, Huckabee is under attack by the Club for Growth and other fiscal conservatives for supporting tax increases during his decade-plus tenure as chief executive of the Natural State. Huckabee is clearly irked by the criticism. He told the Upstate Chamber Coalition during prepared remarks that Arkansas voters overwhelmingly approved tax increases to fund improvements to the state’s “horrible” roads.
Huckabee said the alternative was ignoring a major infrastructure problem or saddling his state with debt.
“You know, there’s a television ad running, I saw it when I got here yesterday, beating me up about some taxes. What they don’t tell you is one of the taxes was a road tax that 80 percent of the people in my state voted for,” Huckabee said.
“You know the average cost of road repair, of car repair, for people in my state was between $500 and $600 a year because the roads were so horrible,” Huckabee continued. “My question is: Was it wrong to raise taxes, or was it right to build the roads? And was it more right when we built the roads to do it with the money the people committed and designated for that or should we have just run the debt up and then later bragged about how we never raised taxes?”
During a news conference following those remarks, Huckabee said the attacks are unfair because they fail to take into account the varying rules governing how different states can raise and spend money. The former governor said his support for taxes in Little Rock has no bearing on how he’d govern in Washington. Huckabee supports replacing the current tax code with a national sales or consumption tax. The federal government does not need more money, he said.
“You can’t [take] some template and lay it over all 50 states if you don’t look at things like, what is the state constitutional requirement for education funding; what is the nature of the legislature; what is the political landscape. There are a lot of factors in there,” Huckabee said.
Huckabee, 59, wrapped up his first campaign swing as presidential candidate at the Embassy Suites in Greenville, in the socially conservative Upstate region of South Carolina, host of the third nominating contest, and first in the South, of the GOP presidential primary next year. He announced for president on Tuesday before a capacity crowd in Hope, Ark., his hometown. Huckabee, a former Fox News television host, now lives in Florida.
For the articulate and jovial Huckabee, a one-time Baptist preacher, the celebrity earned from television, his radio program and the many books he’s published, has its privileges.
Michael Bays, a 40-year-old IT recruiter from nearby Easley, didn’t support Huckabee in the South Carolina GOP primary seven years ago. But Bays likes what he heard from Huckabee on television since then, and said the former governor is in the mix of candidates he is considering supporting in the 2016 primary.
“I think one thing he can bring is common sense to the White House. I’ve always liked someone that’s got strong conservative values, someone that really believes in family,” Bays said. “As someone whose had the opportunity to talk about some of the things in the country on Fox News, he now has the opportunity to make some of these things that he’s speaking about happen.”
