I wanted to find some perspective...to see just how huge this 'revenue shortfall' was. Its always listed in tens of millions of dollars, if not hundreds of millions. But that's the shortfall against spending...I wanna know about REVENUE. That, suspiciously, is hard to find a news story about. So I found some info from the KS budget office, and here's our total tax collections 2011-2016 (tax cuts were implemented in 2012):
2011 $8.17 Billion
2012 $8.75 Billion
2013 $8.91 Billion
2014 $8.47 Billion
2015 $8.54 Billion
2016 $8.67 Billion
Fairly flat
Next I looked at out population change, and from 2010 to 2016, its been a 1.9% increase.
If you look at 2011 vs 2016, we've actually had a 6% revenue increase vs a 1.9% increase. To be fair, we are down 2.7% from the 2013 high water mark.
But, the bottom line is, all this chaos, all this 'the sky is falling', 'the state is broke', yesterday's local headline 'Rescuing Kansas from Brownback', or from a few days ago 'There's no end in sight for Kansas' Budget Misery'...its all about single digit percentage points. We're spending almost $9 Billion a year, and we can't figure out how to live on a few percentage points less?
The Kansas experiment (media's term, not mine) will forevermore be held up as a cautionary tale against cutting taxes by the left...but its really a cautionary tale about our addiction to spending.
Yup...I have a family member who used this as a hammer for every GOP tax cutting initiative...
It is doomed to fail just like Kansas...
Of course he doesn't recognize that tax cutting works to raise revenue have been proved numerous times over the last 60 years...