No leadership in sight
The state income tax cuts that passed in 2012 had many fathers, but the fiscal disaster they have created is an orphan. The result: The legislative session is 21 days into overtime, with no leadership in sight.
Gov. Sam Brownback, the chief architect of this embarrassment, and his backers were powerful enough to purge the Republican majority in the Legislature of many moderates three years ago. But he has looked lame throughout this session and even worse in these chaotic recent weeks, as his fellow Republicans have splintered into intractable factions.
He could help replenish the good will that won him a second term if he’d join some other conservatives in acknowledging they overdid it by zeroing out income taxes for what turned out to be 330,000 business owners and farmers – and by revisiting those tax cuts. Rep. Mark Hutton, R-Wichita, has offered brave, sane guidance along those lines in recent days.
Instead, Brownback has threatened to veto anything that does more than newly tax guaranteed payments to pass-through business owners. (Even proponents of that modest measure say it could be easily circumvented.)
But including increases in sales, tobacco and liquor taxes in his proposed budget was a tacit admission that even the governor knows the 2012 tax cuts and the 2013 adjustments to them aren’t providing enough revenue to be sustainable. The 21 Senate votes Sunday for what would be the largest tax hike in state history seconded that acknowledgment.
Any responsible solution at this point will have to increase taxes. But as it reimposes some income taxes on the exempted businesses and farmers and perhaps readjusts rates upward generally, the preferred fix won’t rely so much on a higher statewide sales tax rate, which disproportionately affects middle- and lower-income Kansans. Nor will it spring a property-tax lid on local governments, largely turn the fate of tax exemptions over to an unelected board or incongruously use tax policy to facilitate school choice – as did the unvetted bill that senators approved Sunday. Unbelievably, that vote came before the bill was available for senators to read.
A few days after 24,000 state employees were pulled back from the brink of mass furlough, the costly incompetence now risks forcing the governor to make 6.2 percent across-the-board spending cuts if the House and Senate adjourn without agreeing on a tax package. The damage done by such a move would be huge, including $197 million in cuts to the school districts that were promised three months ago their block-grant funding would be stable and sure. The Wichita district alone might have to cut $20 million.
House Taxation Committee Chairman Marvin Kleeb, R-Overland Park, said two weeks ago that raising taxes is “just not in our DNA.”
Is governing?
For the editorial board, Rhonda Holman
This story was originally published June 9, 2015 at 7:06 PM with the headline "No leadership in sight."