Life in the Land of Oz is about to get real interesting over the next few weeks as Gov. “Don’t Blame Me” Brownback and the “Who Could Have Seen This Coming” Legislature try to figure how much of a shell game they can play with tax dollars in order to cover up for their own ineptitude.
Not that anyone with a degree in “Real Life 101” should be surprised.
There isn’t a business or household in Kansas who can cut their income flow and tell their employees or family members, “Don’t worry. Nothing will change.”
Sorry, Sam, the state is no different.
Tax cuts were made with the promise that new businesses would locate in Kansas and spur the economy. Apparently those businesses and the jobs they bring are getting sidetracked in our neighboring states.
Missouri has been the only state trailing Kansas in job growth in recent years, but that changed during 2014. During the first six months of the year, Missouri had a 1.4 percent increase in jobs while Kansas’ growth was a near-comatose 6/10 of one percent.
Kansas hasn’t beaten Nebraska’s job growth since 2007.
Colorado was hit harder by the recession than Kansas, but has bounced back much quicker, beating the state in job creation every year since 2010. Likewise, Oklahoma was also hit harder by the recession and is recovering much quicker with job growth of 2.3 percent.
Here are a couple of additional facts about jobs in Kansas.
•Since the 2008 Great Recession, the largest increase in job growth came during 2011 – the year before Brownback’s Great Tax Cut.
•The only year since the recession in which job growth in Kansas beat the national rate was in 2010. That just happened to be when Gov. Mark Parkinson was in office.
So what does this tell us? That cutting taxes isn’t the grand solution that ultra-conservative lawmakers like to believe it is. Carried to its current extreme, it can create a disaster which Kansas is now experiencing.
Keep in mind that when the governor was completely blindsided (yes, completely) by the budget disaster just days after being re-elected the plan he offered was designed to fill a $294 million shortfall. That was before state revenue fell another $15 million below expectations in December, increasing the budget gap to about $310 million by June 30.
Notice a trend here?
Oh, but it gets even better.
Now the governor and legislature have a school funding decision hanging over their heads which could require the state to come up with another $548 million per year, according to some projections.
The legislature won’t have to come up with the money this year. The governor and the ultra-conservative wing of his party will hope that the Supreme Court somehow bails them out of that dilemma.
Or maybe another tax cut is the answer.
In the meantime, lawmakers are raiding various funds – including KPERS and KDOT – in order to find enough cash to get through the end of the fiscal year. That’s like raiding your child’s college fund and digging around in the backyard for cans of buried cash. It might get us through the short term, but it’s not a long-term solution. It doesn’t address a state cash shortfall that’s projected to reach $663 million by June 30, 2016.
The big question facing the governor and the legislature is whether they’re interested in a long-term solution or whether they insist on believing that their tax policy will eventually work if given enough time.
It won’t be easy selling the legislature on the idea of postponing tax cuts that have yet to take effect and increasing taxes. After all, Kansas was supposed to be the “real live experiment” that would prove trickle-down economics does work. To back off now would be an admission of failure.
It would mean going up against the Kansas Chamber of Commerce, Americans for Prosperity and the Koch brothers who are heavily invested in a tax cut policy. And it would mean that the man who didn’t get elected governor was right about tax cuts and the man who was elected governor was wrong.
Imagine that.
Brownback and his supporters are running out of excuses as to why their tax cut philosophy is a failure. More importantly, they’re running out of time.
The stakes are huge. To steal from existing cash reserves is putting the retirement fund for tens of thousands of Kansans at risk, it impedes our ability to main the state’s infrastructure – including highways that businesses coming to Kansas rely on – it will affect our ability to provide a quality education and to care for children in need of state assistance, as well as our poor and our senior citizens.
In other words, it affects every aspect of our lives which are important when people consider whether Kansas is a place they want to move to or a place where they want to continue living.
The curtain has been pulled back on tax cuts and we’ve seen the result.
Do we have the courage to do the right thing to fix the mess we’ve created? We’ll see.
Rod Haxton is editor/owner of the Scott County Record and can be reached at [email protected].