Kansas GOP leader says unfair flat tax will return. It’s an idea that deserves to die | Opinion

The flat tax is dead. Long live the flat tax.

That’s the attitude of Kansas Republicans these days. Having failed in their attempt to upend the state’s tax system in favor of high earners — Gov. Laura Kelly vetoed the bill in April — GOP leaders are now vowing another attempt in 2024.

“Quite frankly, she should have signed it,” Kansas House Speaker Dan Hawkins told a weekend gathering of conservatives in Olathe, according to the Kansas Reflector. “Probably the best tax bill she’s ever going to see, because we are going to bring it back next year.”

We agreed with Kelly’s decision to veto the bill, which would have set the individual income tax rate at 5.15% for every individual in Kansas, regardless of their income level.

The result would have been a gift to the Sunflower State’s richest residents. It sounds like basic fairness on its face: Everyone pays the same rate. But it’s an inherently regressive system. An analysis by the Kansas Department of Revenue found the flat tax would cut up to $3,000 from the tax bill of high earners — and just $50 a year for Kansans at the low end of the scale.

What’s more, that giveaway would have cut more than $300 million annually from state revenues, setting the state government up for eventual budget chaos reminiscent of former Gov. Sam Brownback’s ill-fated “tax experiment” of the 2010s.

So the flat tax bill was bad on the merits.

But it was also the result of a bad process, sprung on the public as an out-of-nowhere surprise following the 2022 gubernatorial election campaign.

Think back a year: Do you remember Republicans running in 2022 on a flat tax proposal? We don’t. The GOP’s campaign was devoted mostly to culture war issues — a harbinger of the anti-transgender laws the Legislature passed this year — but there wasn’t a lot of discussion of tax policy.

Derek Schmidt, the Republican nominee for governor, proposed making retirement benefits exempt from income taxes. Kelly said she wanted to speed up the demise of the state’s grocery sales tax, now scheduled for 2025. And her campaign made every effort to tie Schmidt to Brownback’s legacy.

But a flat tax? No.

If there was any such proposal on offer during the campaign, it eluded the state’s voters and reporters. As best we can determine, debate and discussion of a Kansas flat tax didn’t truly emerge into the public sphere until weeks after the election was complete.

That means Kansans were denied the opportunity to hear arguments for and against a flat tax, or to weigh in on its merits, or to let the issue influence their choice of which candidates they supported.

Is that no big deal? After all, Americans vote for candidates all the time without knowing how they will conduct themselves on any specific issue, and tax policy can be extremely arcane.

We don’t agree. Election campaigns are precisely the time that candidates and parties should present the major elements of their agenda to the public. That’s especially true on a topic — Kansas tax policy — that has been the source of such bitter division in the recent past. To do otherwise hides the ball from voters.

Again: The flat tax is bad on the merits. If Kansas Republicans had campaigned on the issue and then passed a flat tax bill, we wouldn’t have liked it. But that is how democracy works sometimes: You win some and you lose some. Instead, the GOP tried to pass a faulty bill — and only then present it to voters, as a done deal.

That’s still the plan, if Hawkins’ weekend comments are any indication.

“See if she dares to veto it again. And if she does veto it, pray for us,” the speaker said of Gov. Kelly. “Pray for us that we’ve got the votes on both sides (of House and Senate) to override that veto.”

We’ll save our prayers. Instead, we’ll hope for a better bill — and a better process that respects the will of Kansas voters.