Kansas state Rep. Adam Smith: Gov. Kelly should put taxpayers first, not incentives | Opinion
“It is too expensive and not sustainable.”
Judging from her remarks about the most recent tax relief bill, it appears Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly is at it again. She might want to check to be sure her veto pen still has some ink left.
She has an endless supply of recycled excuses to veto comprehensive tax relief to Kansas, no matter what policy she is considering. Her political rhetoric for each one is always the same: “irresponsible,” “back to Same Brownback,” “reckless,” “the Brownback experiment.”
She used the same political fire and brimstone message in her early vetoes, yet the state’s financial condition didn’t plummet into the eternal inferno after most of that policy, with the exception of the most recent two, became law with veto overrides.
If you get rid of the smoke and mirrors, the campaign rhetoric and the political spin, you can decipher Kelly’s true stance on relief to the taxpayers of Kansas: “We don’t have time for tax cuts because we’re too busy spending your money.”
As every household in Kansas already knows, there are two sides to financial responsibility: income and expenses. Each family in our state has to manage its income and expenses with smart and disciplined budgeting.
At the beginning of this year, our governor proposed a state budget that exceeded last year’s by $1.2 billion, about a 13% increase. She also unveiled her $300 million tax relief plan, which provided significantly less tax relief to working-class families than the current proposal on her desk.
The Legislature cut her spending proposal by $300 million and increased the tax relief by about $150 million. We’ve still got $150 million to spare from her proposals yet she has the audacity to call our plan “irresponsible” and “unsustainable”?
The governor likes to take credit for signing the Legislature’s bills for fully funding K-12 education and funding our highway and critical infrastructure projects, but what about all the other money — your money — that is spent through her lieutenant governor’s Department of Commerce? She’s pretty quiet about that because it paints a different picture of her priorities.
I’ll let you be the judge.
Recent audits performed on the biggest economic incentive programs (Angel Investor Tax Credit, Rural Opportunity Zone, Promoting Employment Across Kansas, High Performance Incentive Program, Kansas Industrial Training, Job Creation Fund and Kansas Industrial Retraining) show more than $3.5 billion have been awarded over the past several years, and this is in addition to the APEX/Panasonic electric vehicle battery program that adds billions more of your tax dollars to the giveaways in the name of economic development.
The most damaging conclusion, unbelievably, is not the total amount of money spent on all these programs. Each audit found that while the economic impact is positive to the economy of the region, none of these programs even cover their own costs through increased tax revenues to the state.
If Gov. Kelly is worried about the long-term financial sustainability of the state, maybe she should take a look at some of these handouts first instead of denying Kansans tax relief. Again.
It’s far past time for the governor to put her worn-out Brownback rhetoric on the back burner and finally make our Kansas families the top priority. If she feels the cost to the state is too high, I would ask her to consider the cost of refusing relief to the taxpayers while the state sits on nearly $5 billion in reserves. If she truly believes that an extra $40 million in tax relief is reckless and irresponsible, perhaps she should sharpen her budget pencil a little more or rein in her Department of Commerce from handing out exorbitant amounts of your money to the bottomless pit of economic incentive programs.
Republican Adam Smith is chair of the Kansas House of Representatives Committee on Taxation.
