Kathleen Sebelius calls Brownback tax cuts ‘a disaster’

Kathleen Sebelius said Monday that people should look closely at Kansas before passing the tax cuts championed by Gov. Sam Brownback on a national level.

“If anybody wants to see how this looks, come to Kansas before you pass it nationally,” Sebelius said. “Because it’s been a disaster.”

The former Democratic governor of Kansas told reporters Monday that the state needs to bring in more revenue to provide the services people rely on. And she made it clear that she doesn’t see Brownback’s first-term tax cuts helping the state. Sebelius was governor of Kansas from 2003 to 2009.

“We have a situation where Kansas job growth is lower than our regional neighbors, well lower than the national average,” Sebelius said. “We’re losing jobs, we’re not gaining jobs. We’re losing population, not gaining population. All of the supposed benefits of this tax experiment are failures.”

Brownback has maintained support for the tax cuts, even as new members of the Kansas Legislature ran campaigns focused on rolling back a key component of that 2012 move.

The governor told reporters last week that his views on the LLC exemption, which took roughly 330,000 limited liability companies and businesses off the state’s tax rolls, remain unchanged. The tax cuts also trimmed income tax rates for Kansans and got rid of the highest tax bracket. Budget shortfalls have followed in the years since, including the roughly $342 million budget gap lawmakers now face.

“The idea of targeted small business tax cuts is growing nationally,” Brownback said recently. “It is working here.”

Sebelius was also critical of education funding in Kansas, emphasizing that it wasn’t meeting the state’s constitutional requirement.

“Nobody lives in Kansas because of the mountains or the oceans,” she said. “They come to Kansas for quality of life and for services and for schools. And the fact that we are now losing citizens who are moving out of Johnson County, which had some of the best schools in the country, and across the river to Missouri because the schools are better, I never thought I’d see (that) in my lifetime.”

She also called the Republican Congress’s move to repeal the Affordable Care Act without a new system in place “troubling.”

Sebelius served as President Barack Obama’s Secretary of Health and Human Services when the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, was first rolled out.

“It’s important that the public just say ‘bring us your plan. Let us compare it side by side before 20 million people lose their health coverage. Let’s see what you have in mind.’ That seems to be reasonable,” she said.

Melika Willoughby, the governor’s spokeswoman, said in an email that Kansas has been strong under Gov. Brownback’s watch.

“As the primary architect of Obamacare, Secretary Sebelius is well acquainted with failure,” Willoughby said in a statement. “The launch of HealthCare.gov was the most spectacular government failure in decades. Kansas schools, however, are among the best in the nation, with Blue Valley schools scoring the 2nd highest in the world on recent math and science assessments. As Kansas continues to draw in residents from Missouri, Governor Brownback will continue working to make Kansas the best state in America to raise a family and grow a business.”

Sebelius was in Topeka to watch the swearing in of Kansas Supreme Court justices who won retention votes in November.

This story was originally published January 9, 2017 at 2:02 PM with the headline "Kathleen Sebelius calls Brownback tax cuts ‘a disaster’."