January 2010
Jan. 28, 2010
(Syndicated to Kansas newspapers Jan. 25, 2010)Feeling the pain
The Kansas Legislature has wasted more than 10 percent of the days of its annual 90-day session looking around for ways to “feel your pain” about the sour economy.
How? By trying to find some way to cut legislative salaries to win empathy, to show that legislators understand that losing a job or seeing a pay cut is painful. That’s supposed to make voters feel better, somehow.
While it might look catchy on a campaign flyer, or might be a nice thing to mention during a speech or an eggs-and-issues breakfast somewhere, it really doesn’t amount to anything significant. We’re talking—and many lawmakers so far are spending most of their time talking—about a total reduction in the range of maybe $66,000 for a 5 percent cut in daily pay to maybe $300,000 for a whopping 10-day furlough plan that isn’t going anywhere anyhow.
What it comes down to is spending a lot of time that could probably be better spent working on the budget, figuring out how to finance public education, trying to prevent texting while driving or a passel of other issues that may have significant impact on Kansans’ lives.
Does that sound like a good use of time or money? Or does it sound like lawmakers are trying to pander to a minority of Kansans who for some reason want lawmakers to give up a few hundred dollars for some reason? You elected those legislators to come to Topeka to do some pretty important work, and you either thought that the roughly $17,000 (it pencils out to closer to $12,000 for income tax purposes) that they are getting paid is about right or you didn’t know how much money they got paid and you voted them into office anyway.
The problem for lawmakers now is that they have collectively invested enough time from their 2010 session that they pretty much have to come up with something to show the public. Someone has to be satisfied, whether it’s the portion of the public that for some reason wants legislators to cut their salaries to “feel their pain” or the public that by now has decided that enough time has been wasted on legislative pay cuts that there ought to be something to show for it.
It’s become one of those Catch-22 moments that overall probably isn’t as politically effective as the end-of-session press releases that tout a legislator giving back a couple days’ pay if the session stretches past its 90-day deadline, or donating some pay to, say, Haiti relief, or Planned Parenthood or Kansans for Life or a scholarship fund or something else that sounds either high-principled or politically strategic.
There’s also the chance that by the end of the session—after dozens of receptions and lunches and dinners with lobbyists—some legislators will be noticing that their pants are getting a little tight and will be wondering just how to phrase that weight gain and growing-tighter clothing as somehow “feeling your pain.”
Jan. 21, 2010
(Syndicated to Kansas newspapers Jan. 18, 2010)That uneasy feeling…
Maybe it’s the bloggers, maybe it’s the heightened political intensity of the session, and maybe it’s some bizarre trickle-down from federal health-care legislation and its Tea Party protesters, but things are uneasy in the Statehouse.
Now, there is rarely significant harmony in the Kansas Legislature, especially when taxes and cutting spending are on the docket. Little stuff: texting while driving, congratulating a football coach, sure. Legislators can hold hands and vote together.
But, with the recession, with people out of work, the state budget in deficit and either further cutting or raising taxes as alternatives, things are tense.
That’s a reason that one of the most trivial little actions—by the Senate Tax Committee, and the Senate isn’t even up for reelection this year—stunned a lot of Statehouse regulars.The committee just wouldn’t introduce the bill that comprises the tax portion of Gov. Mark Parkinson’s budget. It proposed increasing the state sales tax by a penny on the dollar and increasing cigarette and tobacco products taxes.
It was the first time in more than 30 years of watching the Legislature that this reporter recalls a governor’s budget bill not being introduced, either as a courtesy to the governor or just by nodded consent of members of a committee.
It appears that nobody on the committee wanted to leave any fingerprints on a bill that would raise taxes. Nobody wanted his or her motion to make the routine introduction to show up on committee minutes—probably winning the moniker as an “enabler” by some conservatives.
Oh, there are Democrats on the committee, and frankly, they didn’t show much testosterone, either, in support of the bill introduced by the governor who is a member of their party.
But, it was just a bill introduction. Didn’t amount to anything tactically or even procedurally because some committee in the Senate is going to introduce the bill.
It reminds us old-timers of the time former State Representative and former U.S. Sen. Bob Dole, R-Kan., tells about when it is necessary to move the legislative process, there are times you just hold your nose and vote…The no-introduction deal in the committee, while surprising, leads many to wonder whether this is the start of a series of sessions when those glimpses of activity purveyed by people who don’t really understand the nuts-and-bolts of the legislative process make inaccurate, or maybe just irrelevant, observations of what’s going on in the Statehouse.
The effect? Not that anything particularly newsworthy is happening, but that what isn’t news can be portrayed as significant…worth your time to read about or call up on your computer. And, if that’s all you see of the process, and if you’re given no background, then what happens—say, voting to introduce a bill so that its ideas can be publicly debated—is you’ll wind up with a very narrow and distorted view of what your lawmakers do.
We’re going to see how this plays out, aren’t we…
Jan. 14, 2010
(Syndicated to Kansas newspapers Jan. 11, 2010)Could make tax committee hearings more interesting…
The more we hear about the hundreds of millions of dollars of sales taxes that the state foregoes because of exemptions for nearly anything that smooth-talkers could talk the Legislature into, the more us old-timers remember former Gov. Joan Finney.
She was governor, remember, from 1991 to 1995, and she had an idea that went nowhere. Simply, it was to put the sales tax on nearly everything, and lower the rates. That was the idea: You could raise the same amount of money by taxing nearly everything at a low rate as you can by taxing just a few things at a higher rate.
Simple, isn’t it? People just laughed Finney off, but you have to wonder whether her idea wouldn’t be welcome now. Instead of a 5.3 percent state sales tax, if the exemptions were swept away, the same amount of revenue could be raised with a rate somewhere around 3 percent.
For most folks, that lower rate would be a windfall. Sure, lawyers and accountants and lap dancers would have to figure in the sales tax if services are taxed, and that might make for some interesting testimony, don’t you think?
Who complains if nearly everything is sales-taxed? Well, start with the lawyers and the accountants, maybe the engineers and…oh, yes, the lap dancers. But for most Kansans who have only so much money to spend, well, when they spend it, they would pay a lower tax. And people buying services, well, they are subjected to paying sales taxes, but at rates that most of us would consider insignificant.
There’s always the religious/charitable problem, though. No, it’s not really a problem, but look for even an agnostic lawyer to complain about a church paying sales tax from its parishioners’ contributions when it buys a vacuum cleaner or a new dishwasher or whatever.
The argument is that if religious and charitable institutions had to pay sales taxes on the same things that secular organizations buy, there would be less money for food and clothing for the poor. But, the poor, when they do eventually have to buy things with what little money they have, would pay less sales tax on what they buy. So far, nobody’s talked about a sales tax exemption for people who can prove that they are poor.
Interesting stuff, and probably a lot simpler than the growing-in-popularity “Fair Tax” which would apply a 20 percent-or-more sales tax to nearly everything but eliminate individual and corporate income taxes. That sounds good primarily for people who don’t spend all their money and essentially get to save tax-free everything that they don’t spend.
The possibilities of expanding the sales tax base and lowering the rate? Probably very slim, with the most passionate arguments coming, well, from people who don’t collect sales taxes now. Imagine that!
We’re not sure whether the issue makes people miss the late Gov. Finney, but most of us folks who hang out at the Statehouse wouldn’t mind seeing a few more lap dancers testifying before the House and Senate tax committees…
Jan. 7, 2010
(Syndicated to Kansas newspapers Jan. 4, 2010)Extinguishing a bonfire
Joan Wagnon, the Kansas Secretary of Revenue, has quietly put out what would have been a bonfire at the Statehouse when lawmakers gather next week to kick off the 2010 session.
She did it by collecting, through negotiations and some deal-making and some persuasion, about $40 million in late or contested corporate income taxes and sales taxes from Kansas businesses and businesses doing business in Kansas.
Most of that wheedling and deal-making came in December. The result is that the state’s December revenue shortfall—while some $18.3 million below estimates on which Gov. Mark Parkinson sharply cut state spending in November—is only about a third of the nearly $60 million it might have been without Wagnon’s negotiation skills.
An $18 million shortfall for the month of December is not good news, but a nearly $60 million shortfall would have caused genuine panic among lawmakers who in the next couple weeks are going to have to approve some spending cuts and reallocation of monies that Parkinson doesn’t have authority to make all by himself. Legislators’ first job will be to deal with the state’s budget woes for the current half-done Fiscal Year 2010. That’s before grappling with the budget for the state fiscal year that starts July 1.
Kansas lawmakers last year gave Wagnon extraordinary authority to negotiate settlements with businesses that challenged their tax bills or just didn’t pay them in full. That’s relatively dramatic in itself that such negotiation power and settlement authority was given to a Cabinet secretary.
And, lawmakers figured that Wagnon could come up with $35 million in payments to the state as a result of those negotiations. That $35 million in jawboning was so important that the Legislature last session included it as part of the state’s revenue stream necessary to balance the current fiscal year’s budget.
We’re not going to learn which businesses squared-up with Wagnon—it’s confidential tax information—but the result is that Kansas received more revenue more quickly than it otherwise would have, and that significantly reduces the state’s revenue shortfall.
If you’re thinking that this is just an interesting little tidbit of information for Statehouse insiders, cutting by two-thirds the December revenue shortfall is going to have real effect on the average Kansan, ranging from those with kids in public schools to those who receive state assistance in this recession. It means that there will be at least another month to gauge the state of the state’s economy and its budget standing, another month to delay pulling the trigger on even further cuts in state spending and programs.
That’s why what sounded pretty serious, an $18 million monthly budget shortfall, probably won’t flare into a $60 million panic when lawmakers start moving into Topeka this week for the upcoming legislative session.