In Kansas, Mississippi, and other states, tax cuts for the wealthy could bring devastating reductions to education, health, and other vital programs.
By Marcus Baram, Capital & Main
Heather Ferguson loves to talk about her daughter’s school in Johnson County, Kansas, and the quality of the state’s education system, citing it as one of the main reasons that she moved here recently from Albuquerque. The school, which she says boasts excellent teachers, is an environmental lab that includes seven acres of woods and ponds where students can study hedgehogs and snakes.
But Ferguson has concerns about recent proposals to cut state income taxes and their potential impact on the education budget. “I don’t want to see wear and tear of the school system” if decreased revenues lead to budget cuts, a scenario which some Kansans fear could be a repeat of the “Brownback experiment” in 2012 and 2013.
That’s when then-Gov. Sam Brownback sharply cut income taxes in the state, guided by conservative think tanks and wealthy donors like Charles Koch. The experiment benefited rich Kansans but decimated the state budget, leading to massive cuts in education and vital services, which in turn resulted in early school closings, cuts to the state’s Medicaid program and delayed highway repairs. The bill cut the taxes of the wealthiest 1% of Kansans, while low-income families saw some of their taxes increase, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. It also hurt the economy, with job growth in the state trailing far behind that of its neighbors and ranking at less than half the national average, despite business tax cuts that Brownback promised would be a “shot of adrenaline” to the state’s economy.
Though these tax reductions were widely considered a failure, some of the same forces that backed them are now pushing through income tax cuts that largely benefit the wealthy in Kansas as well as in Mississippi and other states.
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