Tax cuts for the rich causing chaos in Kansas

Income-tax cuts in Kansas championed by Governor Sam Brownback have led to credit downgrades, political turmoil and deepening budget deficits. This week, they’ll start forcing schools to close early.

As lawmakers work to erase a projected $800 million budget gap for the fiscal year starting July 1, at least eight school districts that saw their funding cut this year because of a greater-than-projected slide in state tax collections will begin shutting down before the scheduled end of classes. Dozens of others have eliminated or cut programs.

“We felt we didn’t have a choice,” said Janet Neufeld, superintendent of Twin Valley schools, which will end the academic year on Friday, 12 days early.

“It’s not good for kids, it’s not good for families,” said Neufeld, whose district serves 590 students in eastern Kansas. “But we’re trying to keep the ship from sinking.”

Early school closings and program reductions are signs of a budget sinkhole in Kansas, where Brownback and the Republican-controlled legislature approved large income tax reductions in 2012 and 2013. They said reduced levies would spur economic activity that would compensate for lost state revenue. The governor called his move to gradually end the income tax “an experiment.”

Not Delivered

It hasn’t delivered the promised benefits, producing instead bigger revenue losses and, at least in the short-term, a cautionary tale of the effectiveness of using large tax cuts to spark economic growth.

Brownback and lawmakers have embraced or considered stop-gap measures to balance the budget, including a $1 billion pension-bond sale and draining the state’s highway fund by $130 million.

They also junked the school funding formula, replacing it with temporary block grants that had the effect of cutting budgets in the current year and forcing districts to adjust to unexpected reductions.

“There have been times when things were tight, but this is the absolute worst I’ve ever seen it,” said Mike Sanders, superintendent of Skyline Public Schools, which will end the school year two days early on May 12.

Skyline, about 75 miles (191 kilometers) west of Wichita, has petitioned the state for emergency cash so it can meet its June payroll.

heavenlyfatheragain wrote:well it's oddly reassuring to know leadership around the world is just as crap as ours...

Ben_Reilly wrote:

heavenlyfatheragain wrote:well it's oddly reassuring to know leadership around the world is just as crap as ours...

As long as people keep voting for the interests of the wealthy over the majority, it's just going to keep on like this.

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback (R), who campaigned on reducing poverty, has instead presided over a steady increase in his state’s poverty rate, new Census figures reveal.

The poverty rate in Kansas was 13.6 percent in 2010, the year Brownback campaigned for the governor’s mansion on a five-point Road Map for Kansas that included a promise to reduce child poverty. It climbed to 13.8 percent in 2011 and hit 14 percent in 2012 in Census data released Thursday. Data specific to child poverty for last year is not yet out, but the the Annie E. Casey Foundation reported this summer that child poverty in the state had reached a new record high in 2011, with 134,000 children — 19 percent of the state’s total — impoverished.

Those results may violate Brownback’s campaign promise, but they are the natural result of the policies he has advanced and signed into law. He cut 15,000 people off the welfare rolls, a majority of whom were children. He slashed child tax credits aimed at the working poor. He eliminated tax rebates for food and rent that were targeted at his state’s poorest residents. He made the income tax more regressive, cutting taxes for the rich and raising them for the poor. Two weeks ago, he announced a change to the state’s food stamp rules that will boot 20,000 unemployed Kansans from that crucial anti-poverty program.

In tandem with those concrete budgetary steps, Brownback convened a Task Force On Reducing Childhood Poverty in November of 2012 to propose “innovative and groundbreaking ways to reduce childhood poverty.” When it finally reported back this month, its 27-page report included just six pages of actual recommendations for reducing childhood poverty. The ideas themselves were neither innovative, testable, nor practical, according to critics like Betsy Cauble of Kansas State University. The task force recommendations included multiple points about promoting family values and the importance of fatherhood. Its other primary area of focus was education, which a federal judge says the state is illegally underfunded by hundreds of millions of dollars under Brownback’s budgets.

darknessss wrote:now theres something I didnt know

America has "food stamps"  

how quaint....and primitive