Before the Senate voted Friday (22-18) to move along an income tax bill originating in the House and mostly rescind income tax cuts of 2012-13, Sen. Caryn Tyson led an effort for another approach.
She favored making all business and personal income tax rates 3.9 percent. Her proposal also would have lowered sales tax on food — which we find commendable — zeroing out after several years, provided retail sales increased 1 percent from each prior year.
We don’t have the numbers on how Tyson’s plan would affect the estimated $1.1 billion deficit projected for fiscal years 2018 and 2019, but the percentage would indicate not nearly as much as the House bill and may have been mostly cosmetic.
Tyson’s comments on education — suggesting that school districts should hold off proposing bond issues in order to save the state money — struck a sour note.
Tyson said the state’s bonded indebtedness — money used to build new schools or make renovations — was $5.4 billion, and accused districts of “writing checks the state can’t cash by building expensive new schools that all Kansas taxpayers must finance with no say.”
It’s only after years of extensive studies and meetings that district patrons put a bond issue up for a vote. In every case, improvements, or new schools, are sought because of a litany of concerns and challenges that prevent a school district’s ability to provide an adequate education.
If legislators had the foresight and the intestinal fortitude to buck Brownback, they would not have approved his March to Zero income tax cuts, and even would have considered restoring some of the property tax levy to keep schools on an even keel.
The argument Tyson often makes is school budgets have increased in recent years.
Of course they have. How else would they keep up with the forward march of education, growing building needs and inflation, meager though it has been?
Also, it is important to understand block grant funding, another example of Brownback’s wizardly financial ideas, includes revenue for retirement funds and pass-through funding for special education, none of which makes its way to mainstream classrooms.
Cutting education funding even more, as has been proposed, is like pulling the pin from a grenade and hoping it doesn’t explode.
Tuesday night Brownback said he would veto the House bill that would have restored some financial sanity in Topeka. That means the budget mess will become only worse — if, again, legislators lack the guts to override it.
— Bob Johnson
