Gov. Sam Brownback used his authority to cut the state budget to the break-even level all by himself last week, and handed the Legislature his decisions. Because that’s where the money is, Brownback trimmed public school funding still further, slashed spending for higher education, the attorney general’s office, the Kansas Arts Commission and the Department of Wild-life and Parks, among other areas.
The governor acted because the House and Senate couldn’t reach agreement. The House wanted deeper cuts to give the governor the $35 million cash carryover he wants to go into the next fiscal year which starts July 1. Estimates now are that the 2012 budget will be nearly $500 million in the red.
The governor will ask the Legislature to cut public school funding another $157 a pupil next year to make a start toward reaching the obligatory balance.
When he presented his latest cuts to the lawmakers, he said “I wish we didn’t have to do this. It’s been difficult, but it’s something we need to do. We must return fiscal sanity to government. We must grow our economy to have resources to work with.”
UP TO NOW there has been no alternative budget proposal made from senators or representatives in either party that would deal with the 2011 and 2012 budget requirements without doing unacceptable damage to the state and its future.
Gov. Brownback says “we must grow our economy” — and then cuts education from preschool through graduate school when every serious student of modern society argues for greater emphasis on creating an educated work force. He says we must create more jobs and then whittles away at the already tiny allotment for the arts when it is easily demonstrated that communities that offer cultural attractions do better at attracting new residents.
The governor, to his great credit, wants to attract new people to the 77 Kansas counties that lost population over the past 10 years and are continuing to do so. But slashing spending for Parks and Wildlife will make those counties less able to create the jobs that tourists support.
Before this session of the Legislature adjourns, the governor and his supporters most likely will introduce bills to cut business taxes still further and argue that doing so will stimulate the economy and create new jobs.
That lowering taxes creates jobs is an article of faith rather than a statement of fact.
When taxes are cut the people hired with the money those taxes raised lose their jobs. Cutting spending on highways, on schools, universities and cultural attractions reduces payrolls in all of those areas. Those jobs lost can be counted.
The economic impact of lowered taxes is much more difficult to assess. Some of that money will be squirreled away for the next rainy day and create no jobs at all. Some will be spent on holidays and create jobs on cruise ships traveling to foreign ports, doing Kansas no good. And some of it may, indeed, find its way into new business enterprises that create jobs.
But the point is that cutting taxes to stimulate the economy is buying a pig in a poke. It is precisely because letting people keep their own money rather than pay it in to pay for schools, highways and other public needs turns the decision-making over to 3 million of us that no one can predict the economic impact.
The biggest tax cut in U.S. history was made in 2001-02. Needless to say it didn’t send the economy soaring.
Our history shows us that the economy is strongest when free Americans get excited about new ideas and turn them into products to produce and sell. Government can be a catalyst in that process by striving for excellence in education and providing the infrastructure that a thriving economy must have to function efficiently.
Once those goals are set at the local, state and national levels, taxes should be set at the level it takes to accomplish them. And that, governor, is one definition of “fiscal sanity.”
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
