A plan to lure out-of-staters into 50 Kansas counties with an income tax break was on the way to Gov. Sam Brownback’s desk Friday.
The 50 counties all lost 10 percent or more of their populations over the past 10 years.
The new law will exempt those who move into one of those blighted counties from another state from the Kansas income tax for five years. It also will enable the counties to join with the state in paying a part of the student loans the immigrants may need help repaying.
The governor compares his income tax ploy with the Federal Homestead Act of 1852, which gave Civil War veterans and others 160 acres of government land in Kansas and the rest of the West if they would settle on it, live there for five years and make improvements.
But there is a difference. The Homestead Act gave settlers a way to make a living: farming. In 1862, 160 acres was a big farm; a farm big enough to get a family well started in life.
Not having to pay income tax doesn’t help if you don’t have any income.
Gov. Brownback obviously had young immigrants in mind, since he coupled the tax break with prospective help with student loans. Fact is, however, that most of the people who would benefit substantially from a five-year state income tax holiday would be those who had five years of income clearly in view.
And that brings us to a question: What attracts people to move from where they are to another community in another state?
In order of importance: a family connection; an economic opportunity; an attractive climate or geographical attraction.
— The governor’s bill will help the man or woman who moves back to take care of an aging parent, but they would have come anyway.
— The counties in Kansas that have lost population consistently over the past century keep losing people because they are short on economic opportunities.
— They are even shorter on mountains, ocean beaches, redwood forests and Hawaiian climates.
So how do you bring immigrants to the 50 counties in Kansas that are losing population? If it is to be done by the state, then the state will have to establish businesses with payrolls.
Woodson is one of the counties that qualify for the income tax break. The state could establish a prison there for drug offenders — as former State Sen. Derek Schmidt fought hard to do. That would bring people to Yates Center — or give the people already there steady jobs.
Perhaps there are other job-creating facilities or businesses the state could create or subsidize in our emptying counties. But let’s look the truth in the eye: the people left because there was nothing for them to do to hold body and soul together. To repopulate rural Kansas the order of business is jobs first, jobs second, jobs last.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
