Tax group definitions.In order to simplify this chart, I created four groups of taxes. As there are many taxes that are small in amount, I group them together as “Other.” For the group “Sales” I include the general sales and use tax, plus the cigarette and tobacco tax, plus liquor and beer tax, as these are of the same nature as the general sales tax.
Note this is both taxes collected by the state, and also by local governments.
Source of data is Kansas Tax Facts, various years. Values are nominal; not adjusted for inflation. To access the interactive visualization that is the basis of the example shown below, click here.
Kansas State and Local Tax Revenue. Click for larger.
Citizens who want to be informed of the happenings of the Kansas Legislature have these resources available.
Legislative documents
The Legislature’s site at kslegislature.org has rosters of members, lists of committees, lists of bills, journals (the daily record of proceedings in each chamber), calendars (the plan for the day, along with topics for upcoming committee meetings).
A useful feature is the “Current Happenings” link for both the House and Senate. This has a link to the bills that have seen movement in some way each day. The page for each bill is generally useful, too, with the steps in the bill’s history, along with links to the bill text, fiscal and supplemental notes, and other material. Fiscal notes — prepared by the Division of Budget — estimate the financial impact of a bill, while the supplemental notes — prepared by Kansas Legislative Research Department — contain background and explanatory information. When attempting to understand legislation, the fiscal and supplemental notes are very useful.
Audio and video
Both the House and Senate broadcast audio of their proceedings. But you must listen live, as the broadcasts are not made available to the public in any other way. It would be exceedingly simple to make these past broadcasts available to the public, as explained here. But the legislature does not retain audio recordings of sessions.
The Kansas Legislature does not make available video of its proceedings.
Documents
Kansas Legislative Research Department (KLRD) has many documents that are useful in understanding state government and the legislature. This agency’s home page is www.kslegresearch.org. Of particular interest:
Kansas Legislative Briefing Book. This book’s audience is legislators, but anyone can benefit. The book has a chapter for major areas of state policy and legislation, giving history, background, and explanations of law. In some years the entire collection of material has been made available as a single pdf file, but not so this year. Contact information for the legislative analysts is made available in each chapter. The most recent version can be found on the Reports and Publications page. The version for 2015 is available here. A version for the 2016 session should be available soon. Update: The 2016 version is now available here.
Of note, versions of the briefing book from years past are useful. KLRD doesn’t provide links to these old documents, but they are available. The search feature of the page (top right corner) will find these documents. It forms a Google site-specific search which looks like this: “site:www.kslegresearch.org summary of legislation.” The same works for old versions of other KLRD documents.
Kansas Fiscal Facts. This book, in 134 pages, provides “basic budgetary facts” to those without budgetary experience. It provides an overview of the budget, and then more information for each of the six branches of Kansas state government. There is a glossary and contact information for the fiscal analysts responsible for different areas of the budget. This document is updated each year. The most recent version can be found on the Reports and Publications page.
Legislative Procedure in Kansas. This book of 236 pages holds the rules and explanations of how the Kansas Legislature works. It was last revised in November 2006, but the subject that is the content of this book changes slowly over the years. The direct link is Legislative Procedure in Kansas, November 2006.
How a Bill Becomes Law. This is a one-page diagram of the legislative steps involved in passing laws. The direct link is How a Bill Becomes Law.
Summary of Legislation. This document is created each year, and is invaluable in remembering what laws were passed each year. From its introduction: “This publication includes summaries of the legislation enacted by the 2015 Legislature. Not summarized are bills of a limited, local, technical, clarifying, or repealing nature, and bills that were vetoed (sustained).” 200 pages for 2015. The most recent version can be found on the Reports and Publications page.
Legislative Highlights. This is a more compact version of the Summary of Legislation, providing the essentials of the legislative session in 12 pages for 2015. The most recent version can be found on the Reports and Publications page.
Kansas Tax Facts. This book provides information on state and local taxes in Kansas. The most recent version can be found on the <a href=”http://kslegresearch.org/Revenue&Tax.htm target=”_blank”>Revenue and Tax page.
Kansas Statutes. The laws of our state. The current statutes can be found at the Revisor of Statutes page.
Kansas Register. From the Kansas Secretary of State: “The Kansas Register is the official state newspaper. This publication provides a wide range of information such as proposed and adopted administrative regulations, new state laws, bond sales and redemptions, notice of open meetings, state contracts offered for bid, attorney general opinions, and many other public notices.” The Register is published each week, and may be found at Kansas Register.
Since statistics were gathered and this article was written in February, several committees have used the commercial file-sharing service Dropbox to make testimony and documents available to everyone. This is a reasonable way to accomplish an important goal.
Availability of testimony in the Kansas Legislature Despite having a website with the capability, only about one-third of standing committees in the Kansas Legislature are providing written testimony online.
On the Kansas Legislature website, each committee has its own page. On these committee pages there are links for “Committee Agenda,” “Committee Minutes,” and “Testimony.” But in most cases there is no data behind these links.
In particular, the written testimony and informational presentations provided to committees would be of interest and value to citizens. Most committees — perhaps all — require conferees to supply a pdf or Microsoft Word version of their testimony in advance of the hearing. These electronic documents could be placed online before the committee hearing. Then, anyone with a computer, tablet, or smartphone could have these documents available to them.
Having committee testimony online would be extremely useful for those who attend hearings. Often there is only a limited number of printed copies of testimony available, so not everyone gets a copy.
This would not be difficult to accomplish. It would cost very little, perhaps nothing.
Plus, citizens could access these documents. Of note, many organizations that regularly testify before the legislature make their testimony available on their own websites. Examples include Kansas Association of School Boards and Kansas Policy Institute.
Publishing testimony online would be an easy matter to accomplish and would be a great help to those following the legislature. It would cost very little or nothing.
Following is a list of all standing committees of the legislature and whether they have any testimony online for the 2015 session. A notation of “Yes” does not imply that all testimony is available online. It means that I found some testimony. Some committees are not listed as they do not meet for the purpose of receiving testimony. (Calendar and Printing in the House is an example.)
Of the 40 standing committees that I examined, 26 do not provide any testimony online.
There exists a simple and inexpensive way for the Kansas Legislature to make its proceedings more readily available.
Proceedings of the Kansas Senate and House of Representatives are broadcast on the internet. That’s good. But the broadcasts are carried only live. There is no archive of recordings. Citizens must listen live, or figure out some way to record the audio. It’s possible, but beyond what most people are willing to do. And given the unpredictable schedule of the legislature, you can’t simply set a timer to start at a certain time each day.
There is a desire by some for live video of the proceedings, which would be great. Even better is archived video, where a person doesn’t have to watch live. But these options are expensive. The expenditure would be worthwhile, but there doesn’t seem to be much desire to spend on this.
Audio, however, provides almost all the benefit of video of legislative proceedings. And it’s cheap. For eight dollars per month the legislature could make audio recordings of its proceedings available to listen to at any time.
For eight dollars per month at least one podcast hosting company offers an unlimited plan. Unlimited storage, and unlimited bandwidth. That’s just what is needed 1. Since the audio of the proceedings is broadcast on the internet, it must pass through a computer somewhere. That computer could also be recording the audio. Once recorded, the process of uploading the audio to the podcast host is a trivial procedure. The recording needs no editing. (In fact, any editing other than cutting away silence before the start and after the end of the session must be disallowed.)
But there’s a problem. Neither Kansas legislative chamber records their proceedings, according to the Secretary of the Senate and the Chief Clerk of the House.
Making audio archives or podcasts of legislative session would be so simple. It is almost without cost. It would have great benefit. Interns could do the work, and it would be good experience for them.
But the Kansas Legislature doesn’t do this. We need to ask legislative leaders to make this happen.
For $79 per month the same company offers a plan geared towards business, with features like multiple administrative users. This is probably more appropriate for the Legislature. But the eight dollar plan would work, too. ↩
Todd Johnson, Chair, Sedgwick County Republican PartyKansas Senate President Susan Wagle spoke to members and guests of the Wichita Pachyderm Club on Friday December 18, 2015. She addressed challenges the legislature will face when the session starts in January.
Natalie Bright and Marlee Carpenter of Bright and Carpenter Consulting briefed members and guests of the Wichita Pachyderm Club on the results of the 2015 session of the Kansas Legislature, and what to look for in next year’s session and elections. December 4, 2015.
The accompanying visual presentation may be viewed here.
The Center on Budget & Policy Priorities (CBPP) is at it again, pushing their political viewpoint disguised as economic analysis, writes Dave Trabert of Kansas Policy Institute.
CBPP pushes political viewpoint as economic analysis
Well, the Center on Budget & Policy Priorities (CBPP) is at it again … pushing their political viewpoint disguised as economic analysis. CBPP’s November 30 blog post attempts to use Gross Domestic Product (GDP) data to warn other states that Kansas’ tax reform is failing.
CBPP’s simplistic look at annual changes in GDP seems merely designed to support their political preference for higher taxes and spending, as a look at the underlying data throws a lot of cold water on their contention.
First of all, CBPP is talking about total real GDP, which includes government and is adjusted for inflation. The intent of tax reform was to grow the private sector, not government, so an honest analysis would at least show the difference. The CBPP chart shows 2013 growth at -0.3% for Kansas and 1.9% for the nation; Kansas also trailed (1.8% to 2.2%) in 2014. The adjacent table shows private sector growth is closer to the national average, but that is just the beginning.
Tax policy certainly has an impact on economic growth but some change is unrelated to tax policy. For example, Kansas is much more reliant on aerospace that most states and changes in that industry are driven by global demand more than anything else. The Kansas economy is also more reliant on oil and gas than most states, so declining oil prices have disproportionate economic impact on extraction and refining.
Each of those three areas declined in 2013 (aerospace is a sub-sector of Other Transportation Equipment Manufacturing) in Kansas but they increased in the nation as a whole. But Kansas outperformed the nation on everything else (97% of the U.S. economy, 95.4% in Kansas), growing 2.5% to the nation’s 2.2%.
That’s not to say that tax reform is a success — it’s far too early to judge — but it does show that factors other than tax reform had a very significant negative impact in 2013.
Let’s now look at 2014. BEA has not yet published sub-sector data for 2014 but we can look at the sectors that include them. Mining (oil & gas extracting) increased in Kansas and the nation, but much less so in Kansas. Non-Durable Goods (petroleum manufacturing) did slightly better in Kansas than across the nation but Durable Goods (aerospace) declined in Kansas while the nation as a whole increased. But once again, everything else grew faster in Kansas (2.5%) than the nation overall (2.3%).
We won’t know for certain until the sub-sector data is published, but there is a reasonable possibility that, aside from those three relatively small sub-sectors, Kansas again outperformed the rest of the nation in private sector GDP.
This is really easy information to find if one bothers to look, but CBPP apparently isn’t interested in real economic analysis; they distort data to support their political perspective as we have shown here and here.
The 2015 projection comes from Kansas Legislative Research and appears to include government rather than just reflect the private sector. Their underlying rationale has been requested and will be addressed here once they provide the data.
Natalie Bright and Marlee Carpenter of Bright and Carpenter Consulting briefed members and guests of the Wichita Pachyderm Club on the results of the 2015 session of the Kansas Legislature, and what to look for in next year’s session and elections. December 4, 2015.
