December 2004
Dec. 30, 2004
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers Dec. 27, 2004)That 10-day frenzy
The Kansas Legislature, all 165 members fresh from the election, will have the chance this session to make one of the biggest improvements in campaign finance reporting law that the state has seen in decades... if they care to...
The major change from a handful of proposals by the Governmental Ethics Commission is "instant" reporting of campaign contributions in those all-important 10 days leading up to an election.
Ethics wants a lot of other stuff, too, but the enhanced campaign contribution reporting is probably the key to voters who care learning about where a candidate’s money is coming from. Now, there are a lot of voters who have other things to worry about, like the R or D behind the name of the candidate or whether the candidate is the one that the voter may know in some way... maybe their kids play soccer together or maybe the candidate is the guy who sits in the corner at the Chamber of Commerce dinners.
But for many voters, knowing who has chipped in to an election campaign broadens the circle of possible indications that the candidate either thinks like the voter thinks or doesn’t. That’s the whole key to elections, of course, hiring a representative who would do what you want done in state government.
Now, candidates, or rather their faithful campaign treasurers, produce a report showing where the campaign has gotten its money and how it has been spent in the weeks before the crucial 10 final days of the campaign. It’s a useful report, but by the time it is written, checked twice, mailed to Topeka or dropped off at the local county clerk’s office and faxed into Topeka, the information is stale and the real, last week campaign frenzy goes unreported until months later, when it is too late to be of any real utility.
Maybe a decade ago, before nearly everyone had a computer and could get on-line, and when it took days to design a campaign brochure, have it printed, get the address labels stuck to them and get them to the post office for bulk mailing, maybe then, 10 days meant something.
But it doesn’t now.
Today, a clerk at the department store can pull money from your checking account and put it into the store’s checking account before you leave the cash register, a printer can be e-mailed an elaborate brochure and have thousands of them printed up before lunch and have them to the post office before dark.
That 10-day delay in reporting campaign contributions means as many as two generations of mailed campaign pieces can be delivered after the books have closed on each campaign’s finances. Setting up radio and television ads, too, can be done so quickly now that the 10-day blackout period isn’t reflective of what is actually happening in the crucial week before the vote.
This isn’t just an urban problem, where big-city printers and big TV and radio stations are able to quickly handle last-minute ads. The technology is available in small-town printeries and at rural radio stations.
Is this going to be a big deal, this up-to-the-minute reporting of campaign contributions? Again, it depends on how closely one follows the elections. If just the party initial after the name is how you decide to vote, then probably it’s not a big deal.
But if, say, you enjoy the scenic vista of the Flint Hills and in the last couple days of a campaign, the windmill mavens start pouring money into a campaign, you might want to know it. Or if home schoolers in your area start pumping money into a candidate’s campaign, you may have an indication of what the candidate may want to do with public education. Or if nearly everyone with a water right starts contributing, it may say something about your chances for watering your field downstream.
Early money in a campaign is an indication of support, but it is the last days’ contributions that tell you who likes the candidate–and maybe why.
It shouldn’t be a big deal, in the last 10 days before an election, to e-mail to the state reports of contributions as they come in. But if legislators don’t want to require the instant reporting, they’ll certainly make those updates sound like an impossible task.
Dec. 23, 2004
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers Dec. 20, 2004)Death penalty--yes or no?
One thing you learn from watching the Legislature for about 30 years is that there is a lot of criminal law in Kansas and while it’s a shame we need all of it, it’s good that the state has many clear definitions of what’s legal and what isn’t and what the penalties are if the laws are broken.
There’s a certain clarity and feeling that the laws are going to be fairly applied if they’re written down and the penalties for breaking those laws also are clearly written down.
The real issue that the Kansas Supreme Court dealt with last week in declaring the state’s capital punishment statute unconstitutional is lack of written-down-in-the-law-books clarity in deciding when a convicted murderer is put to death or will serve the rest of his or her natural life in prison.
We expect clarity in the state’s tax laws, we expect clarity in the state’s fence law, and we ought to expect clarity in the state’s capital punishment law, whether or not you favor taxes, fences or capital punishment.
The reasons that the Kansas Supreme Court declared, on a 4-3 vote, that the state’s capital punishment law is unconstitutional are fairly complicated, dealing with the balancing of aggravating and mitigating factors that led to the murder. And by the time the jury gets to those decisions, it has already determined that a murder has been committed and the jurors have been in the courtroom for days or weeks with the person who committed the crime.
The solution is relatively simple. It’s changing a few words in the state’s capital punishment statute. The Legislature has known for several years that the law was a bit soft, and a former Kansas attorney general, Carla Stovall, told legislators how to fix it several years ago but the Legislature didn’t.
With other issues swirling around the 2005 Legislature, the decision on capital punishment could be relatively simple. Most legislators are grown-ups, and at some level know whether they favor capital punishment or don’t. A bill to repair the statute essentially becomes a bill that will either pass, and give the state a legal capital punishment statute, or not pass, and the state won’t have capital punishment, substituting for it "natural life" or a true life sentence in which the murderer leaves prison in a hearse.
The governor doesn’t favor capital punishment. She voted against it when she was in the Legislature, but in her campaign, she said she supported the law of the state, and at the time, the law of the state was that Kansas would have capital punishment. It doesn’t anymore, and as an opponent, she may well veto the bill if it passes, so it may take 27 votes in the Senate and 84 votes in the House to establish capital punishment in Kansas.
Voting on the bill is relatively simple. It’s yes or no, but the amount of debate surrounding the measure may be interesting to watch. Because the issue is so simple, one would expect that legislators will simply vote either their own conscience on the issue or that of their district, as they determine it.
You’d almost expect that the decision isn’t one that is going to be greatly impacted by testimony of loved ones of those who have been murdered, though there will be proponents of the death penalty who will trot them out to give heart-rending testimony about the qualities and character of those who have been murdered. That will be emotional testimony, but actually not on-point.
And there will be opponents of the death penalty who will trot out statistics to show that capital punishment is expensive, similarly not on-point. There will be opponents who testify that mistakes can be made, and they’ll be right, but that’s why there are elaborate safeguards in trials that can have as an outcome such a final sentence. Those concerns apparently failed the last time the Legislature passed what it believed to be a constitutional capital punishment statute.
Ultimately, legislators either believe the state should have capital punishment or they believe the state shouldn’t.
Good people believe in it and good people don’t. We’ll learn more than that about legislators, though, by how political the issue gets.
Dec. 16, 2004
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers Dec. 13, 2004)Top-shelf marriage?
The upcoming legislative session may be a tough one for an institution that seems to be in pretty good shape right now but will have to be portrayed as in a shambles, a fraud, an embarrassment to the good people of Kansas for reasons that they apparently weren’t clever enough to figure out for themselves.
The institution is, of course, marriage and besides the obvious effort to prohibit same-sex marriages, or at least give Kansans a chance to vote on a resolution to accomplish that, there’s going to be another marriage fixer-upper next session.
The new, high-octane marriage effort would create "covenant marriages" which would be harder to get into and harder to get out of if the couple determines that the marriage is not working.
So first, it was prohibiting gays from marrying or hooking up in any sort of a state-recognized agreement. Next, now, it’s essentially decreeing that the good old standard marriage that thousands of Kansans enter into each year and which seems to be working from all appearances is flawed. Makes you wonder whether a regular old low-octane marriage really justifies a trip to the jeweler or much of a reception.
The concept behind the covenant marriage is that the love and affection that lead to marriage are supposed to last a lifetime according to the greeting card industry. That darn well better happen or the state will intervene to make sure it is expensive and difficult to dissolve that marriage short of someone going to prison or dying. Covenant marriage is an optional upgrade of the social contract and requires counseling on the way in and counseling and fault-finding on the way out.
The real key to covenant marriage appears to be fault. Kansas is a no-fault divorce state. That means that if a marriage just isn’t working, the couple isn’t happy, they determine individually or jointly that they don’t want to spend the rest of their lives together, they can end the marriage by admitting to irreconcilable differences. They don’t have to list them or polish them or figure a bunch of adjectives to put with them. They’re private differences that the couple couldn’t work out.
Enough said, according to Kansas law, which then divvies up the property of the couple and provides for the best possible environment for any children involved. But not enough said if covenant marriages are made an option in Kansas, a couple takes that option and then later decides to divorce–the couple must start naming names and reasons.
It makes one wonder if covenant marriage will trivialize good old-fashioned marriage that is the only sort available to Kansans now–and would continue to be available. Does "regular marriage" become "second class"?
Does a super-marriage somehow put regular-strength marriage into some lesser category of association? Ought there be a percentage discount maybe based on longevity before qualifying for "married filing jointly" on income tax forms? And if covenant marriage is the top shelf product, should gay couples be able to qualify for the second-tier level of commitment that those who don’t opt for a covenant marriage are apparently willing to settle for?
Do you want your son or daughter or sister or brother to get into a relationship flawed by the possibility of no-fault divorce? Did that occur to you last week? Last year?
This thing goes a lot of different ways. If a conventional marriage is so shaky, should you really break out a clean shirt for the ceremony? Is it something that you could just drop by to watch on the way to the grocery? Now that we know that regular marriage is easily ended, which level of marriage merits the better-quality housewares as a wedding present for the couple? Will lawyers be able to sell prenuptial agreements to covenant marriage participants? Will the newspapers put an asterisk beside the marriage license listings of couples who don’t opt for covenant marriage?
That’s not to say that a covenant marriage won’t have its up-side. Couples may think longer and harder about their commitment if it is almost unbreakable. That’s got to be a good thing, even for conventional marriages. There’s surely the opportunity for the state to sell marriage license upgrades to those who are already happily married and confident about it, but would like the additional seal of approval. And maybe when a suitor is on one knee proposing, the recipient of that offer may have a few short questions about which marriage the suitor has in mind... and why.
This may well turn out to be one of the more interesting topics of the 2005 Kansas Legislature. It’ll surely strike closer to home for many Kansans than school finance...
Dec. 9, 2004
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers Dec. 6, 2004)Oh, Canada!
There’s an interesting little political shoot-out coming to Kansas, and it’s about a plan by Democrat Gov. Kathleen Sebelius to facilitate the importation into Kansas medicine cabinets of cut-priced pharmaceuticals manufactured in Canada, England and Ireland.
The deal, thought up by Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, and which Sebelius agreed to, is to have a Canadian firm after some folderol by Kansas physicians accept written prescriptions, have them filled with drugs made in Canada, England or Ireland, and then mail them to Kansas residents. The prices are substantially lower for some high-use drugs which are prescribed for chronic conditions.
OK, that’s simple. If the drugs are clean, well-made, containing the same ingredients that are used in U.S. drug manufacturing plants, what’s the beef? If Kansans can save 25 percent to more than 50 percent on the drugs they have been prescribed by their doctor, that appears to be a good deal for Kansans who need those drugs.
Now, there’s a lot of blarney thrown in here that we probably ought to cut through. It’ll seem heartless, but bear with us. There’s of course the picture painted of poor elderly Kansans, living on fixed incomes, deciding whether they can afford to buy food for the table (jingoists also sometimes refer to heat for their homes) or whether they buy their life-sustaining prescriptions.
Well, that’s all good, but the program’s open to anyone, rich or poor, and some who use the prescription drug plan may be forced into heartbreaking decisions of whether they order the surf and turf (lobster and steak) at the country club lunchroom, or just the steak.
But the point is, the drugs are cheaper than Kansans can buy them from their local pharmacy.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration maintains that importing prescription drugs is illegal. Which sounds pretty strong except that the same agency isn’t doing anything to stop it. That’s probably a disappointment to domestic drug manufacturers. The federal government is talking tough, but as long as the federal government is just whining, who cares?
That may be one reason that the FDA looks pretty pathetic and you have to wonder whether it’s worth the money we’re spending on it.
But if the feds are asleep at the switch, House Speaker Doug Mays, R-Topeka, isn’t. Mays, who by virtue of his title and name recognition has to be considered a potential candidate for governor or insurance commissioner or something, is upset about the possibility of tainted or mislabeled or mis-delivered drugs winding up in Kansas.
Now, he also knows that the popular side of this issue is making sure that seniors, or whoever, gets cheaper prescription drugs. So he vents a dab in a short press release and asks Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline, also a Republican and a possible 2006 gubernatorial candidate or maybe just attorney general-again, to decide whether the program is legal, whether the state faces any legal problems from encouraging the program, and essentially, whether Mays should be concerned.
Kline? Well, let’s see his options. They aren’t pretty. First, of course, is that importation of prescription drugs is against federal law. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that. But, the feds apparently don’t care, or don’t care enough to enforce the law, so why should Kline?
Hmmm..... Does that sound right for a by-the-books attorney general? Not really. And in a 2006 campaign, it comes down to selective enforcement of law. Do you want an attorney general who picks and chooses what laws to enforce? Do you want a governor who as attorney general chooses which laws to enforce? Probably not.
Is there a Kansas-specific law that the drug deal violates? Maybe... but that goes two ways. He can takes the side of the pharmaceutical manufacturers and pharmacists or the side of the food-or-drugs cash-pressed seniors or country club members cruelly forced to make economic decisions from the entree section of their menus.
This might be an area where the governor has made the politically popular decision, and Republicans have to be spoilers.
See where this just might become politically interesting?
Dec. 2, 2004
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers Nov. 29, 2004)The '06 race begins...
The serious politics of the two years leading up to the 2006 gubernatorial election start in earnest next Monday, when the House and the Senate elect new leaders for the upcoming sessions: a two-year Speaker race in the House and a four-year Senate President race in the Senate.
Gov. Kathleen Sebelius is going to get an idea just how tough Republicans are going to make her reelection bid in 2006.
Look for the House to reelect Speaker Doug Mays, R-Topeka, who doesn’t have opposition at this point for his second term as Speaker. This is probably also his last term in the House. Speakers usually don’t spend more than two terms leading the chamber, and those who stay on after that as "mere" members generally don’t have a good time.
In the Senate, the race is at this point a two-horse sprint between current Ways and Means Chairman Sen. Steve Morris, R-Hugoton, who is tagged the moderate, and conservative Sen. Nick Jordan, R-Shawnee. Democrats? Nope, not for the top job in either chamber because it is Republicans with the majority and it is the GOP caucuses who will nominate the top leadership and probably just see those leaders confirmed by the full membership of each chamber.
So how does this impact the governor’s race in 2006?
Because leadership has a big hand in deciding what bills that the governor proposes get passed to her that she can claim as her own policy initiatives, and what bills the governor vetoes and for what reasons.
Say the governor proposes a sweeping prescription drug cost buy-down program. Say it involves a little more government intervention into the marketplace than Republicans like, but that it has a catchy title and brings lower prices to those who need them to afford their medication. Chances are good that the Republican Legislature is going to pass it and send it to her and give her a victory that she can talk about in 2006.
Or, say the Republican Legislature passes a bill that puts a strict limit on the subjects that public elementary and secondary schools are required to teach using state aid to schools, and that other courses that a district might want to offer have to be paid for with local property taxes. Hmmm...
Now, the governor could probably find a way to sign that bill... unless some Republican wildcard amendment is added. How about "abstinence-only" sex education lessons can be taught with state funds? Or how about creationism in science classes? Amendments like that tilt the table, and if you were a Republican running for governor in 2006, you might make abstinence and creationism keys to your primary election campaign. That might lead to a very socially conservative GOP nominee running against a fiscally conservative but socially moderate Sebelius.
Key to those types of bills and amendments coming out of the Legislature this year and next is the leadership of each chamber.
The Senate President and House Speaker can influence both committees, with instructions to chairs that they do or don’t want to see those amendments on bills coming to the floor of either chamber for debate, or can use their power to make it extremely difficult for such amendments to be added during debate.
The leaders can also keep a bill that might be popular, and powerful on the campaign trail for a governor seeking reelection, buried in committees or referred from one committee to the next until it practically never sees daylight on the debate calendar of either chamber.
And, of course, heavy Republican majorities can get carried away with themselves, pandering to the most conservative wing of the party, and finding bills on their way to the governor that might be popular in a party caucus but which are offensive in the wider world of the Kansas electorate... serving up opportunities for vetoes that Sebelius can use her bully pulpit to ballyhoo as extremist, handing her issues that will play well for reelection.
It’s not just the leadership of the Legislature, it’s the tack it takes on bills that may help determine whether Democrat Sebelius is reelected to lead this Republican state. She could be seen as either blocking policy that the state, on the whole, wants or "protecting" Kansans from a too-conservative Republican Legislature.
It could go either way. And the trip will start with leadership elections on Monday...
Nov. 25, 2004
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers Nov. 22, 2004)A moral obligation
The Kansas Legislature, coming up to a session where there may be just a dab of new money available to spend without raising taxes, is facing one of those pesky but important little moral obligations to nearly a quarter-million public employees at the state, school and local level.
This isn’t going to be pleasant.
There are flashier places to spend maybe $50 million a year, but for right now it appears that if the Legislature doesn’t spend about that amount on funding the death and disability program that the Kansas Public Employees Retirement System operates for public employees, the D&D program is going to go broke and benefits are going to have to be slashed.
How did the state get into the problem? Well, about three years ago, when revenues were down and the state was scrapping around for nickels and dimes, it discovered that it could stop making contributions of about $30 million a year to the death and disability fund for public employees.
There was enough money in the trust fund to continue the program for a year, then two years, and now it’s going on three years.
Now, the fund is nearly broke, and by sometime next year, even if the Legislature restarts making contributions of .6 percent of payroll, the D&D program is going to have to be sharply reduced.
How sharply reduced? How about eliminating the death benefit, paid to survivors of state or government employees who die. The 1.5 times annual salary benefit would be the first to go. While that sounds like quite a bit of money, it really isn’t when you consider that most state or local government employees have families up and running with just a lump sum to begin working from while essentially starting their lives again without a breadwinner.
After the death benefit comes reduction in payments for those with disabilities.
The D&D program is just one of those little nooks and crannies in state government that have suffered during the economic downturn from which the state is finally emerging.
It’s one of those programs that needs to be put on sound footing again and it is one of those programs that isn’t going to get headlines during the upcoming session.
It’s not like school finance, it isn’t like more state aid to colleges, it’s not like a state employee pay raise or even a contribution to the cost of prescription drugs for Kansans. It’s one of those quiet programs that represents the right thing for an employer to do for its employees. If the
program isn’t put on a sound financial footing, nobody’s going to notice until there just isn’t money available to make a death and disability payment to someone who manages the junior high school cafeteria or opens the tax payment envelopes that come into the Department of
Revenue or inspects the nursing homes to make sure that conditions there are healthy for the elderly.Just because the program isn’t one of those that immediately springs to mind for most state legislators doesn’t mean that it isn’t a bit of a character test for both returning lawmakers who saw the cessation of payments as a source of free money the past two years and a challenge for newly elected legislators who probably throughout their campaigns for the Legislature never heard the issue mentioned on a doorstep or at a public appearance.
Chances are good that the program will never return as a robust operation with reserves on hand in case there is an emergency, like a building collapse or a bus crash that would instantly turn it into a headline event and send it to the top of the Legislature’s to-do list.
It’s a program that will siphon off money that a lot of legislators would rather spend on something else. It’s a program that isn’t going to garner a lot of enthusiasm from legislators. But this is something that needs to be done.
Nov. 18, 2004
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers Nov. 15, 2004)The politics of health care
If you talk to the candidates who came off the trail this year and got elected to the Legislature, probably a majority of them will tell you that on doorstep after doorstep, voters voiced the most concern about health-care issues.
The successful candidates will tell you that the people on the inside of the screen door asked about the cost of health care, availability of health care, or the rising cost of health insurance and prescription drugs.
Now, maybe those people were actually concerned about the above, or maybe they just were too timid to ask candidates whether they would vote to put an amendment banning gay marriage on the ballot. But somewhere in the mix among major concerns of voters who are interrupted at dinner or caught out raking leaves is health care.
Very practically, the Kansas Legislature can’t do a lot about health-care costs, but that’s no reason that the Legislature can’t work around the edges of the problem. Democratic Gov. Kathleen Sebelius and Republican Insurance Commissioner Sandy Praeger believe they have a way to work on those edges, but that doesn’t mean that it’s going to work, or that the incoming Kansas Legislature is going to allow it to work.
And, practically, this whole effort gets tagged as the "governor’s health plan" because Praeger doesn’t work in the Statehouse and she’s out of the political line of fire for most aspects of this issue.
The "boogeymen" in the governor’s plan: the Legislature is going to fear anything that looks like government meddling in health care and the estimated $50 million cost of the plan–which Sebelius would like smokers to pay through higher taxes on cigarettes and nearly anything else that contains tobacco. Sebelius can do a lot of good stuff for a lot of people with $50 million, but the real problem is deeper... that many people just don’t have enough money to buy their own insurance or pay for prescription drugs.
It is really just that simple.
There are jobs in Kansas that no matter how well they are done, just don’t in the worldwide economic climate command wages high enough to allow people to buy health insurance. And there are industries where margins are low and cutting costs to remain competitive to provide even those low-wage jobs just pushes health insurance out of the equation. Employers can either offer low wages or health insurance and even lower wages. That’s not a very interesting range of options.
So how does this play out? Interestingly for a number of players: Proponents of health care for the poor have some good hooks to use here. Sebelius is talking providing health insurance for children in poor families and coverage for some 30,000 low-wage working parents. That presumably means the children are in better health, parents don’t have to miss work to stay home with them and businesses get to work at full speed and efficiency.
Low-wage state employees get assistance with health insurance, which is good for them, but makes low-wage private employers look either stingy or as employers-of-last-resort. Not what business is after, we’re sure, scrapping around for workers who can get health care through a state job and inevitably driving up the cost of labor for non-government employers.
Anti-taxers have the 50-cent a pack cigarette tax to fight on behalf of smokers. Err, well, not exactly on behalf of smokers. For them, the taxes matter, of course, but it is more or less a testosterone battle. They spent a lot of money in the elections encouraging lawmakers who will promise not to raise taxes on anything for anything. To make their point, they have to hold their ground, or who will give them money in two years to campaign for legislative candidates who promise not to raise taxes on anything for anything? It’s a different take on the issue, but there are people in nice suits who don’t really have to think much about health care, just taxes.
There is a lot of politicking ahead and a lot of reasons to be for or against this health plan. Some deal with health, some don’t.
Nov. 11, 2004
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers Nov. 8, 2004)More bang for the bucks?
Anyone who believes that the newly elected Kansas Legislature is going to come to Topeka in early January and pass a bunch of new taxes to put more money into the elementary and secondary school system hasn’t been paying attention.
The new Legislature is going to be more fiscally conservative than the one that just left town, and it’s not going to willingly raise taxes and send more money to schools. Count on that.
The Legislature is probably not going to be able to muster the votes to reduce the $2.3 billion-plus that the state pumps into the complicated system of financing public schools, but it is going to be looking for ways to get more bang for its bucks–this is the Legislature that was elected at least partly on the slogans about "putting more money into the classrooms."
That phrase has a nice ring to it, everyone wants to see adequate materials for pupils to use to learn, and everyone wants schoolteachers to make a reasonable salary and be able to afford health insurance. Talk to those elected in last week’s voting, and you don’t hear a lot of the old mantra that schoolteacher salaries are low "but they only work nine months a year..."
There is the buzz, of course, about the Kansas Supreme Court’s imminent decision on the constitutionality of the state school finance formula. The court can’t raise taxes and direct them to schools, but it can decree that the money is misdirected and a new formula is necessary. (But it might not even go that far in its decision.)
Well, amid all the concern about education, most legislators will tell you that there is a decent chance that the state is now spending enough money to provide a top-shelf education to schoolchildren but that local school districts are not spending the money efficiently. Too much is spent on administrators, on overhead, on stuff that reduces the amount of money that districts can put in classrooms and in schoolteachers’ checks, they’ll say.
So how do you make the money go further? Legislators have been looking at two ways. One is putting together a strict list of subjects that comprise for legal purposes a "suitable education," which means the state will help finance stuff that is suitable but not whatever isn’t on the list. That’s tricky, because who knows what suitable is? Legislators? Probably not. But they know that they don’t want districts spending state money on esoteric subjects that they don’t believe are necessary.
Another way, which strikes many legislators as sensible, but probably isn’t, is to have school districts prepare an elaborate budget document so taxpayers see how money is being spent. There’s this perception that if the school budget arrives in the mail the same day as your "Field & Stream" or "Road & Track" or "Pots & Pans" magazine that people are going to read the budget. Sure.
Then there’s the governor’s new plan to have accountants who have surveyed school spending nationwide to be directed to scrutinize local school district budgets and come up with a list of "best practices" for spending money in a school district. The best practices are surely going to recommend minimum administration expenses and more money going to the classroom.
The best practices might indicate a district really needs only a handful of administrators or fewer assistant or associate principals per head of pupil. It might even conclude a full-time paymaster is profligate, what with Internet and e-mail available so that paychecks can be written in Topeka, or maybe even in India. (Oh, there might be savings possible on the light bill or gas bill, or in the cafeteria, but the clear indication is that it’s salaries of workers who aren’t actually in the classrooms that are going to be in the gun sights of the auditors.)
The governor’s plan is a different way to go in reducing costs, which would make current spending levels appear to be adequate, just misdirected by local school boards.
Will it work? Will it divert the Legislature from deciding it isn’t "suitable" for fourth-graders to be taught French? It just might. And that shifts the focus of school finance from the state and the Legislature to, well, to anyone else. Which probably is the real objective here...
Nov. 4, 2004
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers Nov. 1, 2004)
Wanna dance?We’re going to get to watch some interesting toe dancing in the Kansas Legislature next session about "tax clearances."
A clearance is basically the Kansas Department of Revenue checking to make sure that you’ve paid your taxes–and any taxes that you collect on behalf of the state or others, like sales taxes, liquor taxes, withholding taxes on employees and such.
The concept is fairly straightforward and it even has a good feel to it. If you are in a business that does business with the state, or hold a state-issued license, then you really ought to have paid your taxes and those taxes that you collect on behalf of the state. That’s just fair. Businesses and people who are licensed to ply their professions by the state ought to be paying their taxes.
In recent years, the Legislature has gotten tough on some businesses that collect taxes and don’t forward them to the state.
First targets for "tax clearances" were liquor stores, private clubs, auto dealers and folks who have Lottery machines. Those targets were the easy ones. Liquor stores, clubs and gambling were singled out initially because they are "sin" industries and nobody much cares if you get strict about their licenses. There’s always another liquor store or club or Lottery machine close by if one gets shut down for nonpayment of taxes.
Auto dealers sought the strict tax clearances on their own industry, laudable, but also smart business. If a car dealership doesn’t pay its taxes, the owner either makes more money or can cut prices and sell more cars. And, there’s that side issue that nobody talks about: intelligence. You have to be fairly bright to operate a car dealership profitably and pay your taxes, but if you collect state taxes and don’t forward that money to the state–just keep it–even a dumb guy can do well in the car business...
Broadening that strict tax clearance policy to other industries and professions is where the rub is going to occur next session. Now we’re messing with doctors, lawyers, landscape architects and nearly every other individual who is allowed to practice his or her trade by virtue of a state license.
The state has even broadened the tax clearances to vendors who do business with the state and newly hired state employees. If you don’t pay your state taxes, the state isn’t going to buy your copiers or hire you to build bridges or highways or fix the air conditioners or work for the state at all. That’s serious stuff, but it doesn’t sound wrong to people who pay their taxes.
Watch for the sliding around by doctors and lawyers next session.
If a doctor doesn’t pay his or her taxes or forward the payroll taxes for his bookkeepers, nurses, aides and such, the doctor and those employees would be out of business. If a lawyer doesn’t pay his or her taxes, his/her secretaries, researchers, paralegals and such would be out of work. So, failure of a doctor of lawyer to pay taxes means sick people don’t get treated and the accused don’t get represented–at least by those non-taxpaying doctors and lawyers.
The doctors and lawyers, and even the Chamber of Commerce, are antsy about the possibility of treating those learned professionals like, well, like liquor store owners.
Are you still looking for the difference between liquor store owners and doctors and lawyers? Have you put your finger on the reason that doctors and lawyers should be treated differently by the state?
The doctors are going to be using the patients they treat to beat the state into some special sort of tax treatment, not that doctors don’t want fellow doctors to pay their taxes, but because they don’t want anything very inconvenient to happen to those who don’t.
The lawyers are going to tout the constitutional right of an accused person to be represented by counsel, not that lawyers don’t want their fellow member of the bar to pay their taxes, but they don’t want anything too distressing to happen to lawyers who don’t.
Starting to see why this might be interesting to watch next session?