Dear editor,
Rogue economist Harry Dent is predicting a major market crash. He claims the Dow will fall to 6,000 and municipal and state governments will default.
Kansas could be one of those to default. Let’s face it, Kansas is broke.
Gov. Sam Brownback and his wrecking crew of a legislature have spent $1 billion from our savings account, sold bonds and borrowed $400 million from the highway fund. We are short $190 million coming into the next fiscal year.
There is no excuse for this reckless management of government. If Brownback were a CEO of a major corporation, he would have been fired a long time ago.
The next governor — Republican or Democrat — is going to be put in a hole that’s going to be hard to crawl out of. It’s taken Brownback only five years to get us into this mess and we have three more to go with his administration. All this just to give the top 10 percent their tax breaks.
Our only hope is that come the November election people will vote their legislators out. (That is, unless Kris Kobach has rigged the voting machines.)
It will take a long time to get the budget back on track. Taxes will have to be raised at a horrendous rate, hitting the middle class particularly hard. Most are living paycheck to paycheck.
Oil and farming are two of Kansas’s major sources of revenue.
Putting farmers back on the tax rolls may help some, but with farm commodity prices so low they can’t be making enough to make a dent in tax revenue.
With oil at $30 a barrel and headed downward, there are going to be more layoffs.
And where are all those jobs Gov. Brownback promised?
David Comstock,
Colony, Kan.
Letter to the editor — January 22, 2016
