Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families
 has issued a new report on how income inequality hurts Arkansas. Highlights:

The top five percent of Arkansas earners make ten times as much as the bottom 20 percent of households.

From the late 1970s to the late 2000s, the most well-off Arkansans saw their incomes grow almost twice as fast as the poorest.

The typical Arkansan’s income has stagnated; in 2012 the median family income was only about five cents an hour above recession levels.

Some ideas to address the gap:

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enacting a state earned income tax credit;

making sure everyone pays taxes based on their ability to pay;

investing in programs, such as education, that increase mobility;

raising the minimum wage; and

strengthening the unemployment insurance system.

Based on actions yesterday relative to the private option expansion of Medicaid under Obamacare — led by retrograde Republicans such as Rep. Nate Bell —  I’d simply say, “Good luck with that.”

Succor for the working man and woman is not part of the agenda for the GOP’s Mean Caucus.

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Consider: We have a landmark expansion of health care for working people in America. The Mean Caucus couldn’t beat its implementation in Arkansas so they’ve set about strangling it.

* They won’t allow it to be advertised or to employ people to sign up working people for benefits. This is explicitly intended to depress participation.

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* They want to limit help in getting sick poor people without cars to their doctors.

* They want to exact a pound of flesh from the very poorest working people, by requiring co-pays by people making as little as $6,000 a year.

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If these conditions aren’t imposed, the Mean Caucus would end the entire Medicaid program in Arkansas, shut down Arkansas government, even, on the strength of a vote from a mere 25 percent of a body nominally intended to provide democratic governance, not tyranny of the minority.

It’s a measure of how bad things are that leaders such as Gov. Mike Beebe and House Speaker Davy Carter  — people with good intentions and considerable political skill — think they have no option but to surrender to bullies like Bell and the rest of the Mean Caucus.

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Punishing working poor by keeping them from getting insurance and rides to the doctor and requiring co-pays of the desperately poor will only exaggerate the broad and growing income gap. If you think Nate Bell and his pals care, think again.

Cry the beloved Arkansas.

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