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BERNSTEIN: Careless conservatism

Kansas’s Republican governor’s tax cuts epitomize unwise fiscal policy

In our increasingly polarized country, one close gubernatorial race has caught the nation by surprise for how competitive it has become. In Kansas, the incumbent Republican Governor, Sam Brownback, is currently trailing his Democratic challenger, State Representative Paul Davis, in the polls.

Gov. Brownback’s unpopularity is a logical result of his failed tax and budget policies. Brownback ran on a classic conservative platform of major tax cuts, inevitably resulting in major budget cuts. Unsurprisingly, as popular as such a platform may have been with Kansas citizens, when put into effect his tax cuts wreaked havoc on Kansas’s economy. According to The New York Times, because of Brownback’s cuts for individual income tax rates and non-wage earnings for small businesses, state revenues fell $300 million short of expectations for the past fiscal year and may result in a $1.3 billion adjustment to the state budget over the next five years. This looming deficit has severely downgraded Kansas’ credit rating and left Kansas as 45th in the nation in new business creation, according to Davis. The income tax cuts were so ideologically extreme that they were actually the largest in Kansas’s history, and Brownback intended, ultimately, to eliminate state income tax in Kansas altogether, replacing it with an increase in Kansas’s sales tax in the hope that this would account for the loss in revenue.

Tax cuts, of course, are not inherently bad, particularly when applied to groups that may be struggling financially (although Brownback’s plan disproportionately favored the wealthy, given that a sales tax is regressive, and a heightened one would be more so). When it comes to income tax policy, there are valid arguments in favor of and against reducing tax rates. But, no matter how popular tax cuts may be, strong ideology should never overwhelm basic logic. State governments need revenue to function, and even proponents of limited government acknowledge that state governments do, in fact, need to function.

In Kansas, not only did the state budget lose a significant source of revenue; in response to that monetary shortage, Brownback could not raise education funding at the rate necessary to maintain and improve public schools. Though primary and secondary schools have received $200 million since Brownback took office, when adjusted for inflation, this actually indicates a decrease in spending on public education.

Such cuts to arguably the most important state-run institutions have a measurable, negative impact: classes become larger, teachers work longer hours, programs get cut and ultimately students suffer, affecting the next class of Kansas’s political leaders.

Kansas’s projected $1.3 billion hole in revenue over the next five years will either have to result in significant spending cuts — potentially cutting essential programs, including public education — or even higher, more suffocating taxes to bring that revenue back into the budget. Essentially, Brownback’s short-term tax cuts have actually created a need for significant tax hikes, completely undermining the original purpose of his cuts.

There is nothing to suggest that this massive economic crisis was unavoidable; in fact, unsurprisingly, when Brownback first proposed his tax policy, critiques of it quickly surfaced, including criticism from fellow Republicans. There is room in politics for responsible tax cuts, if the state’s populace desires such a policy. But sweeping cuts, made without regard for all the possible budgetary consequences, are undeniably irresponsible — a fact Kansas Republicans and conservative Independents are acknowledging, based on Brownback’s poll numbers. No matter how attractive a policy may be in theory, we must always ground our policies in concrete analysis, particularly when it comes to policies with such a high impact.

Dani Bernstein is a Senior Associate Editor for The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at d.bernstein@cavalierdaily.com.

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