Brownback: Higher Sales Taxes Or Bust

KDP Weekly Wrap

This week, Governor Brownback and his GOP allies made themselves clear: raising sales taxes on working Kansans is the only way forward.
That’s why the governor let it be known among Republican legislators that he would veto any budget bill that didn’t include hundreds of millions of dollars in new sales taxes. It’s also why the legislature is at a complete standstill on the budget and any tax plans – Kansas House members don’t want to be held responsible for
cleaning up the mess Brownback created when he passed the worst tax plan in America.
It appears that Governor Brownback is falling back on his most common tactic: bully and threaten legislators until he gets his way. It’s how he got his 2012 tax bill passed, it’s how he defeated moderate GOP senators who opposed his agenda, and it’s how he’s now trying to pass his unpopular tax hike on working Kansans.
Brownback is getting assistance from other right wing legislators like Senate President Susan Wagle who led the Kansas Senate to pass a tax plan that would raise sales taxes by .6 cents and phasing out the home mortgage interest deduction for Kansas homeowners.
Sen. Wagle’s blind support for Governor Brownback has led her to do a complete reversal on sales taxes, leading her to lay out this whopper of a statement:
Sales taxes may not matter to Governor Brownback or Senate President Wagle, but they matter to working families whose groceries, gas, and clothing will all cost more now. Sales taxes matter to small businesses who have to compete across state lines. And sales taxes matter when you look at how Kansas is shifting its tax burden even more heavily onto the backs of the working poor and middle class.
Kansas taxes are already grossly regressive, asking the poorest 20% to pay over 2.5 times as much in taxes as the richest 1%. Middle-class Kansans aren’t getting off easy either, paying well over twice as much in state and local taxes.
So why does the governor and his GOP allies want to worsen this already sad situation? Because it’s the only way they can afford to pay for the tax breaks they doled out to the richest Kansans and big business.
So there you have it – Governor Brownback has backed himself into a corner and is now demanding that the Kansas Legislature bail him out and raise taxes on Kansas families. These actions go to show that KDP Chair Joan Wagnon was right when she said that the governor’s only real priority is protecting tax breaks for the richest Kansans.