Letters on Brownback, teacher merit pay, tax policy, immigrants

Ike wouldn’t like the trash talk

Gov. Sam Brownback’s communications office issued a beautiful and deserved tribute to the late Dwight D. Eisenhower on the occasion of the 125th anniversary of the president’s birth on Oct. 14, 1890. Obviously, Brownback, like all Kansans, I venture to say, has a great deal of pride and respect for one of Kansas’ finest.

It is too bad that he and his communications office do not share even half that kind of respect for the hundreds of thousands of Kansans who lack health care and the many who will die simply because of the governor’s shortsighted ideology regarding the issue of Medicaid expansion. Instead of empathizing with those Kansans, Brownback recently allowed his communications office to unleash a screed accusing the working poor and the unemployed poor of being too lazy to work and a drain on the Medicaid budget while competing with the “intellectually, developmentally, and physically disabled, the frail and elderly, and those with mental health issues” (Oct. 7 Local & State).

The governor’s administration and the Legislature refuse to expand Medicaid despite the fact that the Affordable Care Act requires the federal government to fund no less than 90 percent of the cost of the expansion.

Ike would never have allowed that kind of trash talk from his press secretary.

Ah, the two faces of Sam Brownback.

Merit pay unfair

I see the governor wants to develop a new school finance plan to feature merit pay for teachers and districts (Sept. 14 Eagle). I think it is impossible to develop a fair merit pay plan for education.

Teachers are not making widgets. If they were making widgets, they would all have the same raw material that was made to their specifications. They would all work in the same environment. They would all have access to the same resources. None of these applies on a statewide basis in education.

The purpose of dedicated educators is to take the students from where they are toward where they need to be. There is a big difference between the young student from the affluent family who has had a personal computer since age 4 and the one who is from a poverty-ridden area and has had one coloring book his entire life.

Some call for a graduation exam. Who receives the merit pay – the senior math instructor, the middle school English teacher, the first-grade teacher or the fourth-grade teacher? It is a combined effort.

I guarantee you that during my 44 years in public education, someone I thought was not the best teacher was a hero and an inspiration to at least one or more students. How are you going to test that?

Diminishing returns

The well-known law of diminishing returns states that at a point, a continual increase in effort does not lead to a continual increase in results. Public school classroom teachers have reached that point.

Proudly and nobly, teachers have continued to pour energy, resources, creativity and commitment into providing the best educational opportunities for students in our public schools. All the while the support system has lagged behind and failed to acknowledge these educators’ performance.

Class sizes increase, the number of special-needs students grows, resources have been reduced, support staff has had to be cut, demands for increased testing challenge valued flexibility, and the expectation continues that teachers will provide instructional supplies out of their already limited personal budgets.

Perhaps more important than any of these several negatives is the feeling that teachers sense of not being respected in our culture.

My wish, in teachers’ behalf, is that our governor and legislators would provide adequate funding. I am not confident this will happen, as these political representatives seem more concerned about pleasing their moneyed constituents. To date they reflect virtually no awareness about the demands of competent classroom teaching, nor obviously the long-term benefits of a well-educated citizenry to be derived for our state.

Hence, I conclude with this sincere expression of appreciation and a public statement of utmost respect for our public school educators.

Not just LLCs

Members of the Legislature continue to refer to the business tax exemptions as the Subchapter S and LLC legislation.

What they actually passed is a piece of legislation that exempts business income from a 1040 Schedule C, rental income from a Schedule E, and farm income from a Schedule F.

What we now have are exemptions for a broad spectrum of people who have little to no wherewithal to spur economic activity.

Who no longer pays Kansas income tax on their business income? Likely your insurance agent, your real estate agent, your hairdresser who rents a station in a salon, your babysitter, your landlord, your newspaper delivery person and a host of other independent contractors under the IRS definitions. That is how an excess of 300,000 so-called businesses became exempt.

Those of us continuing to earn regular paychecks or who have nongovernment retirement and Social Security income are now stuck paying more of the cost to pave and maintain the roads and fund state law enforcement and other state services supported by income taxes.

Now might be a good time to protest to your elected representatives, before the dawn of another disastrous legislative session.

Change tax policy

Kansas’ budget is a mess. I have been a Republican for 54 of my 74 years, and I have never been as disappointed in a state government as I am now.

I cannot for the life of me understand why the governor and the Legislature cannot see the folly of the actions that they have made. The removal of 333,000 people from the business income tax rolls is a disaster. If the intent is to reduce the taxes for all of the citizens of the state, there are other ways to do this that won’t bankrupt the state.

One way would be to restore the taxes as they were in 2011-12 and then start over from there and reduce the taxes for all citizens by 2 percent a year until we all reach, say, 2 percent. If we did that, combined with the efficiencies that have been and will be made in state government, we should have money in the bank to cover all of the normal things that the state is responsible for and still have a balance at the end of the year.

In this way, all Kansans share the responsibility of making sure that the government is run efficiently for the betterment of all. The alternative, I believe, is that our state will go into bankruptcy, and we will become even more criticized than we are now on the national stage.

I challenge our area state lawmakers to make the changes needed to make our state tax resources meet our needs.

Immigrants needed

There used to be 16 workers paying taxes for every one person receiving Social Security and Medicare. Now that ratio is less than 3-to-1.

More U.S. citizens are dying than being born. This also means there are fewer and fewer young people paying taxes.

So, like it or not, immigrants are needed to pay taxes, and to do the jobs that Americans need. In the future, if you need a doctor, a roof on your house, or your adult diaper changed, odds are that it will be done by an immigrant or the child of one.

Nearly everyone in America is a descendant of an immigrant. If you want our country to continue to prosper, we have to fix the immigration system, for your sake and the immigrants.

This story was originally published October 17, 2015 at 7:06 PM with the headline "Letters on Brownback, teacher merit pay, tax policy, immigrants."