(Syndicated to Kansas newspapers March 16, 2015)
Well, it’s fast-and-furious at the Statehouse, with financing of public schools mesmerizing most of the legislators and hangers-on who either have an interest in public schools or are wondering what happens to the issues they care about while the school issue boils.
The school issue? How does the state distribute the roughly $3 billion a year for the next two years that Gov. Sam Brownback proposes to spend (or more, apparently, if a court demands it) to help finance schools? Is that enough money to finance the public schools “adequately” as the Kansas Constitution calls for?
That’s the big fight, but there’s another one waiting to enter the ring: Taxes.
While whatever happens with school finance plays out, remember that the Legislature can’t clock out and go home until it has adopted a balanced budget.
That balanced budget is sure to require more taxes—even the governor proposed raising taxes (on cigarettes and liquor) to make his budget pencil out—and when the school business is finally settled, it’s still going to take more taxes to make things balance.
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Surprisingly, the conservative school finance talking point that seems to be the most popular is that the 23-year-old school finance formula is “complicated.” Maybe “complicated” is a tragic flaw in the current formula, which if fully funded would require a boost of state spending on K-12. But then, cell phones are “complicated” and nobody’s tossing them aside in favor of simpler-to-understand black dial telephones.
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So, whether it sticks or not, lawmakers may this week have a number to plug into the budget for K-12, and so far both House and Senate budget committees have tentatively adopted most of the rest of the spending recommendations of the governor—which remember, require increased revenues. Oh, the Statehouse crowd tends to use the phrase “revenue enhancement.” Regular people say “taxes.”
At this point, while the budget folks are assembling this week their Mega appropriations bill which will determine how much the state will spend in the next two fiscal years, the tax mavens are assembling options to finance that budget.
There is a lot on the table. There’s a bill to eliminate that first $20,000 of value of your home from the state’s 20-mill school levy which is worth $47 per homeowner, to putting the sales tax back on your utility bills, worth more than $140 million. And, of course, those cigarette and liquor tax increases which few around the Statehouse take seriously.
Mess with income taxes? That’s more complicated. Remember, those 190,000 Kansas businesses that we thought were not paying Kansas income taxes due to the 2012/13 tax breaks? That number is now more than 300,000. And boost their taxes to more than zero and you are singling them out, aren’t you?
There’s no way to know, because it isn’t one of those check-offs on the income tax form, but there is a suspicion that most of those now-300,000-plus Kansans who don’t pay state income taxes…just might be registered Republicans, who are wondering about who to support in 2016.
Now, if there was just a way to check in with that non-income tax crowd—by party affiliation—to see whether they are a little embarrassed by their status and might not mind a little…just a little…income tax liability. H’mmm.
We’ll see whether the tax committees have made their own assessment of the politics of tax increases that focuses on folks who aren’t now taxpayers. Won’t we?