Kansas lawmakers are debating whether cutting state income in order to do a better job of maintaining highways, educating children, assuring our youth of high quality universities and caring for the needs of the poor, sick and disabled while keeping state spending in line with state income is a viable approach.
To say it kindly, these are self-contradicting goals.
What is on the floor of the House of Representatives is a Republican tax plan. It calls for reducing the state sales tax from 6.3 percent to 5.7 percent, cutting the state income tax and exempting literally hundreds of Kansas businesses from any income tax at all. It would also limit the growth of state spending to 2 percent — a tactic tried in neighboring Colorado that produced crisis after crisis.
It is, in fact, a cockamamie combination of anti-tax, special interest nostrums based on the nonsensical proposition that less equals more.
Start at the beginning. The budget based on this tax-cutting frenzy can be balanced only by stealing $350 million from the Department of Transportation. That theft, if allowed, will be paid for by Kansas motorists as one of the best highway systems in the nation goes to pot.
Then realize that funding for the public schools of Kansas was cut to the bone when the recession slashed tax income and federal stimulus money went away. Based on the ration-al principle that you get what you pay for, Kansas lawmakers should restore K-12 funding as soon as state finances allow. Tax income has been increasing as the recovery builds. Some of that increase should go to our schools to give Kansas children the best possible preparation for a successful future.
Cutting taxes now is exactly the wrong thing to do.
As the recovery continues and state income builds, Kansas should invest more, not less, in its highways, its public schools, its universities and to provide for the disabled, the sick, the needy elderly and those still poverty-stricken due to the persisting recession.
To those who say cutting taxes will stimulate business more than enough to cover the budget loss, the response is phooey. That hope is based on nothing but untested theory; a theory trumpeted to the skies by billionaires such as the Koch brothers of Wichita and their hired pamphleteers but never put fairly to test in any state or nation.
Strapping Kansas into a straitjacket that would never allow the state to grow more than 2 percent a year would all but guarantee a steady decline of Kansas public schools, the Kansas environment, its law enforcement system, its universities and its highways and put our state in a race to the bottom in public health and its care for those who cannot care for themselves.
Members of the Kansas House of Representatives never have faced a sterner challenge. They can buy the pie-in-sky wishanomics that coddles the filthy rich or decide to stick to 2+2=4 math and compassionate government that keeps the welfare of all of the people in its view.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
