Budget Cuts Force Homeless Shelter To Close As Tax Breaks Go To Wealthy Kansans

88m3

88m3

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BY SCOTT KEYES ON JULY 7, 2014 AT 12:24 PM

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Guests enjoy lunch at a Oklahoma City homeless shelter

CREDIT: AP PHOTO/SUE OGROCKI

A shelter for homeless families in southeastern Kansas will close its doors next week amid a funding shortfall.

The CHOICES Family Emergency Shelter houses approximately 350 homeless people every year, the majority of whom are children. There are currently nine families, including 26 children, living in the shelter. According to the AP, three other families were set to move in as well.

The closure is coming after an unexpected budget shortfall this year. The shelter depended on state funding to keep its doors open, but for 2014 it received less than half the approximately $200,000 it needed to continue operating. The Kansas Housing Resources Corporation, which distributes money to shelters across the state, changed its formula for doling out funding this year to send more money to western Kansas, though it’s not entirely clear why.

According to Steve Lohr, Executive Director of Southeast Kansas Community Action Partnership, which operates CHOICES, “this is the first time in our 48-year history” that it hadn’t received enough state funding to continue operating. “We were defunded 50 percent,” Lohr told ThinkProgress.

While the state isn’t offering enough money to keep all its homeless shelters open, it is doling out large new tax cuts to rich Kansans. Last year, Gov. Sam Brownback (R-KS) signed a package of nearly $1.1 billion of tax breaks that will predominantly go to the wealthy. It’s not just homeless shelters that are losing out. These tax breaks are also coming at the expense of funding for poor school districts, people who rely on food stamps to eat, and the state’s overall economic health.

Sam Brownback circa-2006 would have trouble recognizing Sam Brownback today. The then-Kansas Senator kicked off his presidential campaign by spending a night in a Louisiana penitentiary in order to highlight problems with recidivism and the poor treatment of prisoners. He also garnered a humanitarian reputation after championing social justice causes, such as funding to fight AIDS in Africa and sponsoring the Prison Rape Elimination Act. As governor, he has instead focused on austerity and tax breaks for the wealthy.

Case managers at CHOICES will try to help all 12 families find somewhere else to live when it closes its doors on July 15, but their prospects aren’t great. CHOICES, located in downtown Pittsburg, is the only shelter serving homeless families in 11 southeast Kansas counties. Many parents work in the area and their children attend local schools, so trying to find a new shelter could mean uprooting their lives once more in order to move somewhere where a family shelter still operates.
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2014/07/07/3456832/kansas-shelter-closes/
 
88m3

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The CHOICES Family Emergency Shelter houses approximately 350 homeless people every year, the majority of whom are children. There are currently nine families, including 26 children, living in the shelter. According to the AP, three other families were set to move in as well.
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Party of family values, folks.

If we got rid of those pesky child labor laws we could have a more productive society.
 
DEAD7

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Time will tell with these cuts :ehh:

Despite the objections of some – perhaps biased – observers, the Kansas tax cuts appear to be working. Christopher Ingram at The Washington Post’s Wonkblog declared the failure of the Kansas tax cuts based on a single metric – when compared to average US job growth, Kansas job growth has lagged. It should also be of note that Ingram bases part of his criticism off of a Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) study, citing them as a “nonpartisan think tank” – the The New York Times has called CBPP “left-leaning”, The Washington Post has called them “progressive”, and Time Magazine has called them “liberal” as has the National Journal.

To really understand the success of the Kansas tax cuts, one would need to look not at a US aggregate of unemployment data, but at the Kansas-Missouri border where two states share a split metro area and for all-intents-and-purposes a porous boundary.

  1. Bureau of Labor Statistics data details a significantly better trend for Kansas as opposed to Missouri following the passage of the first round of tax cuts in 2012. In the year 2012, both Missouri and Kansas saw significant drops in state unemployment rates. Kansas began in January, 2012 with a rate of 6.1% and finished out the year at 5.4%. Missouri began 2012 at 7.5% and finished out the year at 6.7%. However, in 2013 after the 2012 Kansas tax cuts had kicked in, the two states diverged. Kansas continued to reduce their unemployment rate, dropping from 5.5% in January 2013 to 4.9% in December. Missouri, on the other hand, saw their rate fluctuate – beginning the year at 6.5%, then climbing to 7.2% in August of 2013 before finally seeing a drastic drop in December to 5.9% (partially due to holiday hires in the retail sector – note: this applies to Kansas as well). The preliminary rates for 2014 show Kansas holding steady at 4.8% (comparable to nearby Iowa holding steady at 4.3/4.4%, Nebraska at 3.6%, and Colorado around 6%). Missouri, unlike Kansas, has seen their unemployment rate increase – moving from 6% in January of 2014 to 6.6% in May.


  1. An examination of the non-farm employment data provided by the BLS for the Kansas City Metro-Area, specifically, shows a drastic shift of employment growth from the Missouri side to the Kansas side:

Kansas%20tax%20cuts%20are%20working%20graphic.jpg


The greatest job growth in the Kansas City metro-area has been generated in Kansas, not in Missouri. It is arguable that the 2012 spike was caused by businesses anticipating a better tax climate in Kansas after the 2012 tax cuts.

From a broader regional view, Kansas still remains a relatively high tax state with a top rate of 4.9% – at least until further income tax rate reductions kick in. Colorado, by comparison has a flat rate of 4.63%. Prior to 2013, Kansas was higher – at 6.3% – than Missouri which has a top rate of 6%. Additionally, the current 4.9% rate is relatively on par with Oklahoma which has a top rate of 5.25% - though, again, prior to 2013 the top rate in Kansas was higher.

While the state budget shortfall has made news, there is strong evidence that most of the shortfall can be traced to federal tax policy changes and not state changes – though Josh Barro writing at The New York Times disagrees. CBO data, that I have detailed here, points to a shift in capital gains filings out of 2013 and into the end of 2012 to avoid President Obama’s “Fiscal Cliff” which resulted in an increase in the federal capital gains tax. This left many states – from California to Connecticut – with shortfalls and downward revisions in revenue projections this past tax year. Long story short, other states who have not enacted tax reforms like Kansas are also struggling with the accuracy of their revenue projections this year.

One final note, Kansas is required by law to have a balanced budget, unlike the Federal government. A significant budget surplus this year will alleviate much of the concern with the lower than expected revenue collections. Opponents of tax reform and spending interests want to try and write an early obituary for the Kansas tax reform. Unfortunately for them, the tax cuts are working and will continue to improve the Kansas economy for years to come.
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superunknown23

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Charlatans, Cranks and Kansas

Two years ago Kansas embarked on a remarkable fiscal experiment: It sharply slashed income taxes without any clear idea of what would replace the lost revenue. Sam Brownback, the governor, proposed the legislation — in percentage terms, the largest tax cut in one year any state has ever enacted — in close consultation with the economist Arthur Laffer. And Mr. Brownback predicted that the cuts would jump-start an economic boom — “Look out, Texas,” he proclaimed.

But Kansas isn’t booming — in fact, its economy is lagging both neighboring states and America as a whole. Meanwhile, the state’s budget has plunged deep into deficit, provoking a Moody’s downgrade of its debt.

There’s an important lesson here — but it’s not what you think. Yes, the Kansas debacle shows that tax cuts don’t have magical powers, but we already knew that. The real lesson from Kansas is the enduring power of bad ideas, as long as those ideas serve the interests of the right people.

Why, after all, should anyone believe at this late date in supply-side economics, which claims that tax cuts boost the economy so much that they largely if not entirely pay for themselves? The doctrine crashed and burned two decades ago, when just about everyone on the right — after claiming, speciously, that the economy’s performance under Ronald Reagan validated their doctrine — went on to predict that Bill Clinton’s tax hike on the wealthy would cause a recession if not an outright depression. What actually happened was a spectacular economic expansion.

Nor is it just liberals who have long considered supply-side economics and those promoting it to have been discredited by experience. In 1998, in the first edition of his best-selling economics textbook, Harvard’s N. Gregory Mankiw — very much a Republican, and later chairman of George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers — famously wrote about the damage done by “charlatans and cranks.” In particular, he highlighted the role of “a small group of economists” who “advised presidential candidate Ronald Reagan that an across-the-board cut in income tax rates would raise tax revenue.” Chief among that “small group” was none other than Art Laffer.

And it’s not as if supply-siders later redeemed themselves. On the contrary, they’ve been as ludicrously wrong in recent years as they were in the 1990s. For example, five years have passed since Mr. Laffer warned Americans that “we can expect rapidly rising prices and much, much higher interest rates over the next four or five years.” Just about everyone in his camp agreed. But what we got instead was low inflation and record-low interest rates.

So how did the charlatans and cranks end up dictating policy in Kansas, and to a more limited extent in other states? Follow the money.

For the Brownback tax cuts didn’t emerge out of thin air. They closely followed a blueprint laid out by the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, which has also supported a series of economic studies purporting to show that tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy will promote rapid economic growth. The studies are embarrassingly bad, and the council’s Board of Scholars — which includes both Mr. Laffer and Stephen Moore of the Heritage Foundation — doesn’t exactly shout credibility. But it’s good enough for antigovernment work.

And what is ALEC? It’s a secretive group, financed by major corporations, that drafts model legislation for conservative state-level politicians. Ed Pilkington of The Guardian, who acquired a number of leaked ALEC documents, describes it as “almost a dating service between politicians at the state level, local elected politicians, and many of America’s biggest companies.” And most of ALEC’s efforts are directed, not surprisingly, at privatization, deregulation, and tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy.

And I do mean for the wealthy. While ALEC supports big income-tax cuts, it calls for increases in the sales tax — which fall most heavily on lower-income households — and reductions in tax-based support for working households. So its agenda involves cutting taxes at the top while actually increasing taxes at the bottom, as well as cutting social services.

But how can you justify enriching the already wealthy while making life harder for those struggling to get by? The answer is, you need an economic theory claiming that such a policy is the key to prosperity for all. So supply-side economics fills a need backed by lots of money, and the fact that it keeps failing doesn’t matter.

And the Kansas debacle won’t matter either. Oh, it will briefly give states considering similar policies pause. But the effect won’t last long, because faith in tax-cut magic isn’t about evidence; it’s about finding reasons to give powerful interests what they want

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/opinion/paul-krugman-charlatans-cranks-and-kansas.html
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Now Brownback is trailing in the polls to a democrat... in kansas! :krs:
 
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