Benefits of Tax Cuts Without Raising Debt

By Dave Trabert, President Of Kansas Policy Institute.

"President-elect Donald Trump should learn from Kansas’s mistake on income-tax reduction: Don’t reduce revenue and increase spending. That’s the real problem with the Kansas budget (“Brownback Sees Kansas Tax Plan as Model for Nation,” U.S. News, Dec 24). There was never an expectation that spending wouldn’t have to be adjusted to accommodate revenue reductions, but Democrats and many Republicans refused to make government more efficient so spending and taxes were increased in 2013 and again in 2015. Kansas spent 27% more per resident in 2015 than the states without an income tax.

The income-tax exemption on pass-through income for proprietorships, partnerships, Sub-S corporations and LLCs is paying real dividends. U.S. Census data show that pass-through businesses actually created the majority of new jobs in 2013 and 2014 (the most recent data for employment by legal organization). And while Kansas continues its decadeslong tradition of trailing the national average on job growth, Kansas is performing closer to the average since taxes were reduced.

Census data also show employment for pass-through entities is almost at parity with C corporations in the U.S., and cutting the corporate income tax affects only about half of the business employment base. Pass-through business profits are taxable to the individual owners, so individual rates must also be reduced to really help the economy."