This is the (fiscal) year Kansas legislators are happy to kiss goodbye. Or maybe boot out the door.
Monday’s numbers showed we ended the fiscal year $338 million shy of that budgeted. For June, we were $28 million short.
Today marks a clean slate, so to speak, except there’s no reason to expect any better returns for fiscal year 2015. Gov. Brownback doggedly maintains his tax cuts are creating a “Kansas renaissance.”
Can’t you tell?
Perhaps if we were walled off from the outside world it would feel that way.
Truth is, Kansas lags neighboring states and the nation in job growth. We are one of only five states that have lost — not gained — jobs since the first of the year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In the five-state region, Kansas is the only state to still have fewer jobs today than in 2008, the onset of the recession.
Brownback has planned a total of $4 billion worth of tax cuts over the next five years. Today, state coffers are projected to be darn near empty by year’s end.
This is a roadmap to doom.
THE PREMISE of Brownback’s supply-side economics is that tax cuts have such a positive effect on the economy that they need not be balanced with spending cuts. As a tax-free haven, industries are supposed to flock our way, and consumers are to spend like crazy.
The lower tax barriers are also supposed to allow manufacturers to produce for less, and thus charge less. Only they aren’t.
When is the last time you saw the price of something drop?
And, of course, when sales taxes are kept high, the formula hits disproportionately on the middle class and poor who use more of their income to purchase food and clothing.
The trickle-down effect stops right at the front door of the well to do, conveniently.
PAUL DAVIS, presumed Democratic nominee for governor, understands this game and how it is geared to favor the wealthy.
On Monday, Davis proposed to postpone the Legislature’s income tax reduction schedule, as well as others.
“We want to freeze everything right where it is, right now,” he said in a speech Monday.
Halting the tax cut schedule would produce an estimated $1.2 billion over five years.
Davis brings sanity to the discussion.
Stanch the bleeding. Fund our obligations. And then see what’s possible.
— Susan Lynn
