Where will Gov. Sam Brownback and the conservative Legislature try to take Kansas? Up the mountain — or over the cliff?
Think positive.
Put aside abortion and gay marriage. Those issues grab headlines but don’t really have much to do with a state’s overall performance. With Brownback in the governor’s chair it is a given that more anti-abortion legislation will become law. As a consequence, poor women who are denied the medical care they want will go without or risk infection from amateur practitioners. Women with resources will go to other states.
But poignant as those personal dramas are, they only affect a small percent of the population. Other public policy changes will bear far more heavily on the course Kansas takes for the majorty of its citizens.
Gov. Brownback has pledged to freeze state spending. The large Republican majorities in the Legislature not only will back him up on that promise but may try to cut taxes in addition.
Eighty-eight percent of the state budget today goes to education or to social services. Freezing spending, therefore, means that the cuts made in state aid to the public schools will not be restored. It also will be bad news for families with children in the state’s colleges and universities. When state appropriations for those schools were cut due to the recession it was necessary to raise tuition to keep the doors open. A spending freeze will prevent restoration of those budgets and mean continued high tuitions.
What a spending freeze will mean to social services is less clear. Much will depend on what Congress does to the administration’s health care reform act. The law calls for increased state spending on Medicaid to cover lower-income individuals and families that don’t have health insurance.
In the case of Kansas, the act would send enough additional federal dollars to Topeka to reduce the Medicaid drain on the state budget. But what actually will happen remains in the air: many of the new Republican majority in Congress campaigned on promises to repeal “Obamacare,” or, at least, cut its funding.
If the additional Medicaid funds fall victim to that tactic, states like Kansas will be forced to pay for Medicaid (medical care for the poor) from some other source, or reduce the level of care provided to the state’s most needy citizens.
Other social services, such as programs for the developmentally disabled like that provided by Tri-Valley, already have waiting lists. Freezing the budgets of those programs makes sense only if the numbers of citizens in need of them don’t continue to grow and if their staffs are willing to accept frozen wages and benefits.
LET’S NOT BORROW trouble. Gov. Brownback is a savvy politician. He will be looking for ways to build a record of accomplishments. He is keenly aware of the importance of education in today’s knowledge-based workplace. He knows the state must continue to invest in its infrastructure if its economy is to flourish.
He knows full well that Kansas can’t go back to funding its public schools with local taxes without devastating property-poor school districts such as those in Allen County — and much of the rest of the state.
As a fervent Christian, he will not turn his back on the poor, the ill and the disabled.
The hope Kansans must cling to is that the pressing realities our state and the nation face in 2010 will trump ideology. Kansans voted Tuesday for a governor and legislators to overcome obstacles and reach exciting goals. Come Jan. 1, they should tackle that assignment.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
