Brownback still sees sunny skies

Gov. Sam Brownback is sticking to his sunny forecast for the state budget and economy, and suggesting there will be no need for more tax hikes or deep spending cuts in 2016.

“I think we’re going to be in good shape,” the governor recently told Associated Press. “I think we’re going to be able to work our way on through, provided we don’t have just a real big global economic set of problems.”

He also has stepped up his claims that his 2012 tax plan “has worked.”

Though he’s right that unemployment is down and hourly wages are up, Kansas lost 2,600 nonfarm jobs in November and has one of the lowest job-growth rates in the nation. The promised adrenaline rush from those tax cuts never came.

Brownback hasn’t said how he proposes to plug the $170 million budget gap projected for fiscal 2017, which starts next July. If he’s worried, he isn’t showing it. In any case, he said, “I don’t think we ought to be messing with taxes.”

But Kansans should be wary, as they heard the same confident talk from the governor and his GOP allies before the 2015 session stretched to a record 114 days and ended with record tax increases.

Now, thanks to that outcome, Kansans pay among the steepest sales taxes on groceries in the nation. Tobacco taxes rose, too, as state leaders further turned to lower-income Kansans for revenue so 330,000 business owners and farmers could continue to pay no state income taxes.

And since July, the administration has had to offset lagging revenue collections by sweeping fees, robbing highway funds and tapping more federal money. The state just quietly issued a record $400 million in highway construction bonds; the expansion of 2010 highway plan debt to a total $1.2 billion was enabled by the 2015 Legislature’s just-as-quiet two-year suspension of a debt cap. Kansas also sold $1 billion in bonds in August, using those proceeds to shore up the underfunded state pension system.

Fueling concern was the recent warning by independent auditors that a general fund balance deficit for the fiscal year that ended June 30 “raises significant liquidity risks regarding the state’s ability to meet its financial obligations as they come due without raising revenues, cutting costs of services provided, and effectuating financial restructuring.”

Meanwhile, the Kansas Department of Corrections has more inmates than capacity now, and needs to plan for another 16.4 percent increase in prison population by 2025. The Kansas Board of Regents requested more state money for the state universities. Social services that help the poor and vulnerable have been waiting since the Great Recession hit for the time to be right to seek more state funding.

Of course, odds are great that the state will lose the lawsuit brought by school districts, and be ordered by the Kansas Supreme Court to spend millions more on K-12 education.

Given all that, can Kansans count on Brownback’s assurances that the state is fiscally fit?

This story was originally published December 19, 2015 at 6:05 PM with the headline "Brownback still sees sunny skies."