When Gov. Sam Brownback signed his massive income tax reduction bill last week, a handout was distributed predicting that the tax cut would produce 23,000 new jobs in the state by 2020, over and above normal growth, and that 35,000 people will have moved into the state. This would be, he said, like a “shot of adrenaline into the heart of the economy.”
Once again the Kansas Economic Progress Council took a careful look at the governor’s numbers and discovered Kansas would outpace the governor’s predictions for job and population grown under normal circumstances.
KEPC observed:
“Current Kansas employment in April was 1,357,100, according to the Kansas Department of Labor. An addition of 23,000 new jobs would be less than 1.7 percent. In fact, a May 18 news release from the department said job growth was more than half that number in just one month.
“Private sector employment grew by 13,900 jobs since March 2012,” it reported.
KEPC went on to look at past job creation numbers. The state created 66,800 jobs between 2003 and the beginning of the recession in 2008, or 5 percent annually.
“An additional 23,000 jobs over the next seven years would certainly be welcome, but it’s hardly ‘a shot of adrenaline’ compared to what Kansas has been able to do in a normal recovery.
“So, what about the projection that Kansas will add 35,740 new residents? Kansas’ current population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, is 2,871,238. The addition of 35,740 new residents by 2020 would be only a 1.24 percent increase annually. According to Census Bureau estimates, Kansas beat that percentage of population growth in eight of the 10 years between 2000 and 2010, when it added about 16,429 residents a year. That was a 6.1 percent average. An additional 1.24 percent increase in population growth would be welcome, but it’s hardly ‘a shot of adrenaline into the heart.’ Maybe more like a cup of regular coffee.”
UPON THOUGHT, Gov. Brownback was smart to temper his extravagant rhetoric on the stimulative effect of his drastic tax cut with much more realistic hard numbers. Come 2020, Kansas will probably have met these very modest goals — unless beggaring state government sends people away rather than beckoning them to come live in a lean and mean utopia — and the governor can then claim that he told us so.
His “less equals more” experiment begins July 1. That’s when supply-side theory gets its Kansas reality check; that’s when to start keeping score.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
