Governor Ducey hopes to eliminate the income tax. He wants to continue cutting business taxes, which, according to him and fellow conservatives, will bring businesses streaming to Arizona by the U-Haul-load. He wants to change the school funding formula to reward “success,” a term he hasn’t defined.
Same with Kansas. An article in this week’s NY Times Magazine, The Kansas Experiment, puts Arizona’s conservative agenda items in national perspective. Kansas, under the leadership of Governor Sam Brownback, who took the helm in 2011, is moving in the same direction, and is probably farther along in the process. The two states aren’t identical, but the similarities are strong enough that you can almost see Ducey and his fellow state conservatives leaning over Brownback’s shoulder to read his playbook.
Here are some excerpts.
With Brownback as governor, Kansas is in the midst of a self-described economic ‘‘experiment,’’ a project that, whatever you think of its merits, is one of the boldest and most ambitious agendas undertaken by any politician in America. Brownback calls it the ‘‘march to zero,’’ an attempt to wean his state’s government off the revenues of income taxes and to transition to a government that is financed entirely by what he calls consumption taxes — that is, sales taxes and, to a lesser extent, property taxes.
[snip]
The march to zero, which includes an already-passed provision that exempts the owners of 330,000 businesses and farms in Kansas from income tax, was designed, Gene said, to turn Kansas into a different sort of tourist attraction. As he and his fellow conservatives see it, it’s an ‘‘open for business’’ sign, one they hope will draw free enterprise to the state.
[snip]
[State Rep. Gene Suellentrop, vice chairman of the Tax Committee in the Kansas House] brainstormed with Dave Trabert, the president of the small-government Kansas Policy Institute, about whether there was a way to isolate the administrative costs in the state education budget, so Republicans could cut them without reducing classroom spending.
[snip]
In the past four years, Brownback has remade the Kansas Republican Party in his likeness. The party’s once-powerful moderate wing has withered after steep losses in consecutive primary elections, the main battleground where policy is determined in a one-party state.
[snip]Brownback’s devotion to his tax cuts would make it difficult, if not impossible, for him to live up to a second goal he had set for his administration: increasing spending on education.
[snip]
In early March, the results of the back-room negotiations over school financing were announced at a news conference by the leaders of the budget committees for the House and Senate. The plan essentially froze spending for school districts for the next two years while loosening the rules for how districts could spend what money they did get. It repealed the formula that the state had used for more than two decades to allocate money to districts, which was based on enrollment, property values, the number of special-needs students and other factors. Republicans pledged to create a new formula, one that emphasized outcomes and student achievement over ‘‘Suburbans for superintendents’’ — Suburban-driving superintendents being, in Kansas at least, the 21st-century equivalent of Ronald Reagan’s Cadillac-driving welfare queens. But they gave themselves two years to figure it out.
[snip]
[E]conomic reality was failing to cooperate with the governor’s expectations. Brownback, after signing the tax cuts in 2012, pledged that they would act as ‘‘a shot of adrenaline into the heart of the Kansas economy,’’ a metaphor that called to mind an image of the governor astride a dying state, like John Travolta atop Uma Thurman in ‘‘Pulp Fiction,’’ preparing to deliver a gleaming needle to the chest. In an op-ed article in The Wichita Eagle, Brownback made the cuts sound magical, suggesting they would create tens of thousands of new jobs, bring tens of thousands of new people to the state, leave more than $1 billion in the bank accounts of taxpayers and even ‘‘directly benefit our schools and local governments’’ by expanding the population and the economy.
[snip]
[There is] a lawsuit before the Kansas Supreme Court over whether the Legislature’s K-12 cuts were constitutional and satisfied the legal requirement to adequately and equitably educate Kansas children. In the coming weeks, school districts would announce layoffs and program cuts. A large suburban district said it would cancel its elementary-school Spanish program. In Kansas City, just before the budget was passed, the superintendent announced a 10 percent cut to every school and department budget. NPR reported that Kansas teachers were ‘‘fleeing’’ to Missouri, with twice as many unfilled teacher jobs in Kansas — 700 — as there normally were at that time of year.
[snip]And the dream of zero, at the end of the day, is what buoys [Rep. Gene Suellentrop] and his fellow travelers, no matter how arduous the journey ahead. Barring a surprise that is outside the control of Uncle Gene or the governor — an economic boom of the likes that has yet to be seen this century, filling the state’s budget with a surplus of tax revenues that would make hard choices easy to avoid — Republicans in Kansas will almost certainly be debating again next January, and perhaps for many Januaries to come, whether the march can keep moving.
This article appears in Aug 6-12, 2015.
If AZ eliminates state tax it will be in conjunction with vouchers for school of your choice. With the mass shortage of teachers at the public school level they can not dump all the tax credit kids on the public school system because it will collapse under the load.
You’re right, this ain’t Kansas and there is more to use our tax money on than education. You continue to only offer blame with resolutions being higher taxes and unfettered spending in the guise of better teachers. Money, money, money and as long as the gov’t with holds it you’ll only offer lip service and nothing else.
There is more to use our tax money on than education? Yeah, we’re already doing that, and it’s not working out so well. Teachers do require salaries, pupils do require supplies, and that requires money. It’s not that complicated.
I’m good with using ALL our tax money on education, forsaking money for mass transit, law enforcement, public safety, health care, municipal services and anything else you can think of.
Of course some will read into my comment their own agenda for the purpose of……..well, maybe they could better explain.
Now have mercy. You know those business owners and corporations are really suffering. Some can’t even afford a summer home or a 3rd BMW.
Business owners? You mean the food trucks? The thrift shop owner? The guy who pays you?
The clowns in Phoenix have been trying the cut-business-taxes routine for ages, along with passing the buck to local governments while building more private prisons. It’s not working and doing more of the same isn’t going to work, either.
This is what happens when you have a lot of state legislators without college degrees passing legislation. Theory-based financial suicide.
The issue most troubling for any business considering a relocation to Arizona is the impending water shortage. The legislature and the governor can cut taxes all they want but without water, the economy must shrink or grow much slower than any political leadership would care to admit. California is already going through this painful process.
Arizona lacks the educational critical mass to become an idea generator or financial center, which means low income service industry jobs and the slow rate of spending and consumption on the part of individual consumers that implies. Even retirees will look elsewhere if they can not be assured that they will have a steady supply of water or even stability on the homes they buy.
I had thought that we learned from the 2008 crisis that ideologically driven decisions were simply too expensive. I’m also confused at how voters are so willing to ignore the obvious and cling to the hope that there is an ideologically driven solution for the messes we’re in that will somehow spare them from having to pay an additional $10 in property taxes per year on their homes or an additional $100 year in sales tax.
What is it Fram says? “You can pay a little more now, or a lot later.”
We need to fund AZ education as if this state and its children have a future. We need an initiative drive to pass an education-only funding tax. The initiative needs to include a refundable income tax credit to refund part or all of any extra tax paid by low, moderate, and median income families. This is the only way all Arizonans can afford a new tax. Many AZ residents, part-time residents, and visiting non-residents have the ability-to-pay a small increase in either sales tax (Jun through Apr only for tourists?), or property tax, or even income tax. A refundable income tax credit is essential to protect those families whose children are being hurt the most by high teacher turnover rates and large tuition increases.
As the State Treasurer’s report points out withdrawing principal from the land trust fund is neither a short-term, nor a long-term education funding solution. And a new tax needs to be in place to replace the temporary sales tax that expires in 2021. There is no other logical alternative. An education tax increase with a refundable income tax credit is the only future-friendly and family-friendly way to pay for an education system that we don’t have to be ashamed of.
The current state budget is based on robbing Peter to pay Paul. Now Gov. Doug Ducey wants to rob the long-term to pay for the short-term by spending the endowment of the state’s land-trust education fund.
At a 10 percent payout clip there is no way we are not going to cut into the principal of that fund. In the short-term, the length of Ducey’s terms as governor, Ducey wants a balanced budget. He wants it so he can advance, maybe complete, a project begun by Fife Symington and Janet Nepolitano: abolishing the only ability-to-pay, graduated tax we have, the income tax.
This state will stagnate. The people are not dumb enough to vote for a permanent increase in regressive taxes such as sales tax and property tax. The hair on the head of every CEO and every board member of every civic organization should be on fire.
Civic organizations that have any positive civic reform or improvement project requiring state or local government expenditure, no matter how small, should think about disbanding. And there will never be adequate funding for the Department of Child Safety.
When the income tax is gone, that’s it. The civic improvement game is over.