Opinion

High prices at the pump, increasing costs at the grocery store and excessive monthly energy bills are all devastating for the hardworking Arkansans trying to make ends meet. For at least one northeast Arkansas resident, rising expenses made it too difficult to continue running his contracting business, so he closed the doors.

Arkansas House and Senate Democrats released a plan today to raise teacher salaries by $4,000 and raise the minimum teacher salary from $36,000 to $42,000. The Raising Arkansas’s Investment in Schools and Educators (RAISE) Act would use $600 million from the estimated $1.6 billion surplus to create a fund that will allow the raises to be indefinitely sustainable based on current projections. Democrats urged Governor Asa Hutchinson to include their proposed legislation in the August special session so that teachers can get a raise now.

2022 is the 50th year anniversary of the establishment of the Buffalo National River. It was hailed as a milestone in the protection of a pristine river by taking it from a state park to a national park with the main effort in halting the river from having a dam put in place. However, as with most federal bureaucracies, they have taken more and more authoritative power to the point of dictating how the state should conduct government affairs outside the boundaries of the national park. They have accomplished this by refusing to publicly acknowledge their own limitations that have been put into place, not only by the National Park Service, but by the federal government as well.