I’ve written it many times: Kansas Governor Sam Brownback and his political cohorts bask in the glory of the state’s financial crunch. This is where they want to be.
Why don’t the people of Kansas realize what is going on? The media write about it. Books, blogs, letters to the editor and op eds allude to it. Coffee klatches focus on it. Yet, it flourishes under his trickle-down, starve-the-beast leadership.
His ties to the Koch brothers have surfaced repeatedly, mainly along the lines of their libertarian viewpoints — ones pushed by their John Birch politically motivated father.
A New York Times editorial blistered Brownback’s politics. Dark Money, a book by Jane Mayer, depicts Brownback as a true libertarian masquerading as a Republican.
Liberal commentator Bill Moyers pointed out how impressed a friend of his was after reading the book:
“Her thesis, impressively backed by careful research and a wealth of rich anecdote, is that the Kochs and their network of billionaires have ALREADY bought the American political system: the House, the Senate, many state legislatures, the systems of legislative and Congressional redistricting and significant beachheads in American higher education. Only the White House has eluded their grasp, though now most of the Republican candidates are dependent on their largesse and responsive to the policy demands of the plutocrats who bankroll all except Trump. Further, she argues that what we once knew as the Republican Party is, in effect, being supplanted by a private party of billionaires who use its machinery but have little use for the traditional political tools of compromise and negotiation. Why? Because they want what they want, hate government and don’t really care if it works.”
The grand myth should be apparent to all. The trickle-down theory that sweeping tax cuts generate rising revenues has come crashing down and Kansans are feeling the pain.
An exuberant Brownback enacted the largest tax cuts in the state’s history in 2012 and 2013, a $1.1 billion upper-bracket boon for which he promised rich economic returns. But the governor and the Republican Legislature were soon shortchanging the state’s public school budgets in compensation.
Per-pupil state aid has declined from $4,400 to $3,800 during the Brownback years. That has forced reductions in staffing, classes and school days in the more poorly financed districts. It has also fueled the current crisis in which the public school system faces a shutdown on July 1, imposed by the State Supreme Court, unless the state government restores some of the equity it sacrificed in pursuing the trickle-down myth.
The Times editorial said, “Even some Republican supporters of Mr. Brownback, finding their schoolchildren threatened by declining standards, are calling for the reversal of some of the tax cuts. They shouldn’t expect a positive response. The governor and the Legislature have rebuffed and evaded rulings from the State Supreme Court, which found that the Legislature had violated the State Constitution’s clear requirement that it provide fair and adequate support for all school districts, including impoverished ones with less property tax revenues.
“Instead of abiding by the court’s mandate, Mr. Brownback and the lawmakers insisted they know better than the courts on how to fund the schools, making sure not to harm the budgets of richer districts. During an earlier round of the court fight last year, Mr. Brownback and his allies enacted a retaliatory measure that threatens to strip the court system of its funding. This was a despicable low, particularly for conservative politicians promoting themselves as strict constitutionalists. Now they’re denouncing ‘activist’ judges and working to replace the justices.”
The court said the latest attempt to fix the problem — a change in funding formulas to a block grant system — would create “intolerable, and simply unfair, wealth-based disparities among the districts.” At issue are the disparities in funding suffered by the poorest districts, four of which sued in 2010 and won their cases. The larger question, which the court promises to answer at a later date, is whether the state has provided for enough total revenue to sustain a fairly funded public system, the editorial said.
Instead of finding ways to provide more revenue to fill the nearly $300 million hole in the budget, Brownback is slashing and burning. In addition to the cuts to KDOT already announced, the brunt of the problem was solved by cutting universities, state agencies and Medicaid (KanCare). Those additional cuts total $97 million for fiscal year 2017.
Ann Mah, a former Democratic member of the Kansas House of Representatives who now works as a trainer/speaker in Topeka, pointed out that in fiscal year 2017, universities and the Board of Regents will get cut by more than $30 million.
“The Legislature said these cuts had to be proportional to the amount of money raised by the universities, punishing our research universities for bringing research jobs and money to our state,” Mah said in a newsletter. “KU and KU Med alone will be cut $10 million. K-State will be cut $6.6 million. Elsewhere in our area, Emporia State will be cut nearly $1.3 million. Make no mistake. These cuts will be devastating to some programs.”
Which brings up the point that while the conservative politicians boast of tax cuts, the people of Kansas are paying the eighth highest state sales tax in the country and school tuition, licenses and fees are going up, up, up. KU administrators have requested a 4 percent increase in tuition while K-State is after a 5 percent hike.
Various other state agencies are facing the cuts, Mah noted, “For example, the Kansas Water Office was cut by $250,000. Did you know that we are already outsourcing public water testing to Iowa because we no longer have enough trained chemists to do it ourselves?”
More cuts are expected, as Mah pointed out, “By statute, we are supposed to have over $450 million in the bank at the end of the year as a cushion. At a minimum, you need $100 million to ride out the bumps.
“We have just $5.9 billion in revenue and $6.3 billion in expenses. That is an imbalance of $424 million. That doesn’t get any better in 2018. The ‘new normal’ is a continual budget crisis and a state government that is being gutted.”
Worse yet, she said, the state is creating debt for future generations, noting, “We borrowed $400 million from KDOT and then bonded out $400 million to cover. We are repaying that with interest-only payments, racking up a bill we still have to pay at some future date. It may well take us a decade to recover.”
Brownback bragged about how his plan would bring more jobs to the state. Kansas is near the bottom compared to other states in job creation — just 800 private sector jobs in the last 12 months — a zero percent job growth rate, Mah said.
The frustration of Democratic legislators is mirrored by an email from Representative John Alcala of the 57th District:
“We Democrats in the Kansas house are powerless against his influence and the number of votes he carries that allows him to do these things. And the real sad part about this is all the damage it’s going to cause to people in the amount of time he has left in office. I do my best every day to try to derail any of the stupid antics that he continues to do.”
Brownback’s antics are well-planned. He’s doing exactly what he set out to do: Get government out of the way so the affluent can go their merry way — unregulated and powerful.