An elderly woman who lives in north Iola is not an atypical example of what careless government overreach may do to those it should be most careful about serving.
In her late 70s and a widow, the woman lives alone in a small, comfortable home and depends on less than $600 a month in Social Security benefits to pay her bills.
The house being free and clear, utilities, food, insurance and medications are her main concerns each month. Property taxes are minimal. She has cable TV, though at its most inexpensive tier. She has some tech savvy, but no computer. She depends on a cellphone to communicate with friends and relatives, who live elsewhere.
Reading is a hobby and friends occasionally drop by. A neighbor boy mows her lawn on the cheap, and she sometimes worries what she’ll do when he graduates high school.
For years she and her husband were careful with money, but they never were able to accumulate much. She carefully budgets, and any deviation from current responsibilities would be a burden.
No one would guess she “just gets by.” She’s cheerful and never frets about what occurs.
Even so, when Jim Denning, GOP majority leader in the Kansas Senate, last week proposed adding a fee to utility bills to provide new dollars for public schools, the outcome would have been distressing for our nice little lady in Iola, as well as many other folks.
And not just the elderly. Young couples with one, two or more children also have to count pennies as the next payday approaches, and any external increase of what they must pay is a millstone encircling their neck.
Denning suggested $9 for residential customers — $3 each for electric, water and natural gas — and $10 for businesses.
To a Johnson Countian who is as flush as Denning likely is, $9 or $10 seems like a financial afterthought.
Not for many in our fair state.
Denning’s proposal isn’t likely to fly, but it points out how some legislators — thankfully not so many as in sessions past — are willing to go to any length to preserve the devastating income tax cuts of 2012-13 that put Kansas on the Laffer Curve to a fiscal wilderness.
INSTEAD of with bits and pieces coming from smoke-filled back rooms, legislators must — and that’s a very strong must — begin today with the session reconvening to flesh out a plan to increase revenue coming from income taxes.
They have the $889 million shortfall looming in fiscal years 2018 and 2019, and yet unknown how much to satisfy the constitutional mandate to make public education adequately and equitably funded.
Supreme Court justices gave legislators an ultimatum of structuring a school finance formula — after finding block-grant funding unconstitutional. They also must provide state aid to fund the new formula, which is bound to require no less than $150 million a year more than this year was sent education’s way. Probably more.
Sales and property taxes are tenuous options, and neither has the wherewithal to meet demand of the two-year shortage, much less what school finance will require.
It is well past time to stop playing silly fiscal games and get down to restoring income taxes at a level to generate revenue to meet the needs of the state and provide all that is required for its citizens.
— Bob Johnson
