Meet the REAL Mike Huckabee (Economic Record)

"Governor Huckabee says he is a fiscal conservative," Club for Growth President Pat Toomey said, "but his ten-year economic-policy record as the governor of Arkansas is mixed, at best. His history includes numerous tax hikes, ballooning government spending, and increased regulation. To be sure, Governor Huckabee's record displays an occasional deference to a pro-growth philosophy, but that is only a small slice of a much bigger picture. The Club for Growth feels citizens deserve a full picture of where Governor Huckabee stands on the critical economic issues of the day." - Club for Growth

• Immediately upon taking office, Governor Huckabee signed a sales tax hike in 1996 to fund the Games and Fishing Commission and the Department of Parks and Tourism (Cato Policy Analysis No. 315, 09/03/98).

• He supported an internet sales tax in 2001 (Americans for Tax Reform 01/07/07).
• He publicly opposed the repeal of a sales tax on groceries and medicine in 2002 (Arkansas News Bureau 08/30/02).
• He signed bills raising taxes on gasoline (1999), cigarettes (2003) (Americans for Tax Reform 01/07/07), and a $5.25 per day bed-tax on private nursing home patients in 2001 (Arkansas New Bureau 03/01/01).
• He proposed another sales take hike in 2002 to fund education improvements (Arkansas News Bureau 12/05/02).
• He opposed a congressional measure to ban internet taxes in 2003 (Arkansas News Bureau 11/21/03).
• In 2004, he allowed a 17% sales tax increase to become law (The Gurdon Times 03/02/04).

Under Governor Huckabee's watch, state spending increased a whopping 65.3% from 1996 to 2004, three times the rate of inflation (Americans for Tax Reform 01/07/07). The number of state government workers rose 20% during his tenure (Arkansas Leader 04/15/06), and the state's general obligation debt shot up by almost $1 billion, according to Americans for Tax Reform. The massive increase in government spending is due in part to the number of new programs and expansion of already existing programs initiated by Governor Huckabee, including ARKids First, a multimillion-dollar government program to provide health coverage for thousands of Arkansas' children (Arkansas News Bureau 04/13/06).

• Raised the minimum wage in April 2006 from $5.15 to $6.25 an hour and encouraged Congress to take the same initiative on a national level (US Newswire 08/03/06), a proposal that President Bush and most congressional GOP members oppose.
• Sought to take revenue from his tax hike proposal to be used on economic development projects in 2002 (AP, 11/22/02).
• Threatened to investigate price-gouging after 9/11 if gasoline prices went up too high (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette 09/12/01).
• Ordered regulatory agencies in Arkansas to investigate price-gouging in the nursing home industry (AP, 06/15/01).
• Signed a bill into law that would prevent companies from raising their prices a mere 10% ahead of a natural disaster. Services like roof repair and tree removal were targeted (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, 03/07/97).

Governor Huckabee is on record opposing the most important element of genuine school choice-voucher programs that allow poor students in failing public schools to attend private schools and inject much needed competition into a decrepit public education system-because of a concern about government control of parochial schools (Arkansas Times 09/22/05). He also called No Child Left Behind "the greatest education reform effort by the federal government in my lifetime," (Washington Times 03/01/05) a program that stripped schools of local control and increased federal spending on education by 48% over three years (Heritage.org 11/09/06).