As a result of the Great Recession, Kansas state finance was indeed in dire condition the year before Brownback took office. Individual income taxes, the mainstay of state spending, had fallen by $487 million, or 17 percent, in the two prior years. Sales and use taxes had fallen by another $112 million in the same period. And the state’s balance sheet was indeed at zero on June 30, 2010, six months before Brownback assumed office. But Brownback had nothing to do with fixing this problem. He was comfortably in the U.S. Senate preparing to run for governor. Gov. Mark Parkinson and a bipartisan coalition of state legislators did step forward in the 2010 legislative session and address the issue by passing a three-year, 1-cent sales tax, grabbing money from the highway fund, and plugging federal “stimulus” funds into school finance. The 2010 action taken by these courageous state lawmakers avoided a financial crisis and handed Brownback $1.14 billion in added sales and use tax revenues for his first three budgets. A turn in the Kansas economy that began in 2010 – again not of Brownback’s doing – added another $500 million in individual income-tax receipts to state coffers in the same period. In sum, that heroic coalition of 2010 plus an economic upturn gave Brownback his $700 million in state balances plus another $1 billion he has applied to state spending. After all that, Brownback surely fell on his knees and profusely thanked those lawmakers. To the contrary, he turned on them. He joined with his stalwart ally, the Kansas Chamber of Commerce, and targeted them for defeat. As a result, 13 incumbent House members in the bipartisan coalition were defeated in November 2010. Read more here: kansas/2014/03/09/3332037/h-edward-flentje-rest-of-the-story.html#storylink=cpy
Posted on: Mon, 10 Mar 2014 12:12:26 +0000