A version of the following commentary appeared in The Topeka Capital-Journal on February 15, 2026.
It’s a neat partisan narrative, but it doesn’t fully describe what happened.
Smith wants readers to see the Brownback era as a morality play with a single villain and a simple moral: never try this again. The record shows something messier, and more instructive — a bipartisan refusal to do basic math. Citizens and policymakers of both states deserve a more nuanced view than the one he offered readers.
Kansas did enact a large tax cut in 2012. Lawmakers collapsed three income-tax brackets into two, cut the top rate to 4.9%, and — most controversially — set the tax rate on many “pass-through” businesses at zero. That last measure encouraged existing earners to recast themselves as LLCs to avoid taxes without creating new jobs: a serious design flaw.
Revenues fell sharply. Total general fund tax receipts dropped by roughly $500-$700 million between 2013 and 2014, an 11% year-over-year decline. Later analyses found that added economic growth replaced only a fraction of the lost revenue. The tax package blew a large hole in the budget.
But Kansas also failed to show spending restraint. The Legislature’s approved 2012 budget — passed just before the tax package — amounted to an increase of about $379.5 million, or 6.7%.
Kansas cut tax rates while increasing spending. That isn’t “pro-growth reform,” and the failure wasn’t confined to one party: Republicans supported the cuts, and Democrats joined in approving budgets that didn’t balance revenues and expenditures.
When revenues started missing forecasts, Kansas turned to “efficiency” promises it never delivered. In 2015, lawmakers paid consultants to conduct a statewide efficiency review that outlined potential savings of about $2 billion over five years. Yet three years later, Kansas had implemented only about $30 million of those savings.
Opportunities existed, but neither the governor nor legislators in either party were willing to do the hard work of cutting and restructuring.
Smith points to grim consequences — foster children sleeping in offices, a strained mental-health system, prison unrest — but some of those problems predated the 2012 tax bill. What the tax cuts did, unmistakably, was shrink the state’s capacity to respond. Lawmakers also plugged the immediate budget hole by diverting roughly $1.4 billion from the Department of Transportation, trading future highway work for short-term relief.
Then came bad economic luck in major state industries. A Kansas State University analysis notes that 2015 farm income in Kansas was the lowest since 1985, reflecting steep declines in crop prices. As oil and gas prices fell, tax revenues trended downward in 2014-2016. Those commodity shocks weren’t caused by the tax cuts, but they made an already unbalanced budget much harder to manage.
None of this redeems the 2012 tax package. In the years after the cuts, Kansas lagged national averages and many neighboring states in job growth. Net migration turned negative while others gained residents. The pass-through exemption was exploited far beyond original projections, and the resulting budget stress contributed to repeated credit-rating downgrades and ongoing fights over school funding.
To understand the episode, you can’t stop at “tax cuts bad.” You have to follow the arithmetic and the politics: Kansas cut a major tax, raised spending, largely ignored its own efficiency roadmap and then got hit by a regional downturn in farm and oil income. The overriding failure was an unwillingness — from Brownback, from many Republicans, and from Democrats — to bring spending in line with revenue.
Yet over the same decade, states such as Indiana, North Carolina and Tennessee cut income-tax rates — or even phased out remaining income taxes — without the kind of budget crisis Kansas endured.
More than 20 states have reduced personal and/or corporate income-tax rates since 2012 without producing Kansas-style turmoil.
Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe’s talk of a “glide path” to eliminating the income tax, financed in part by broader sales and use taxes, raises real questions about who pays and how the budget will balance. Those questions deserve scrutiny.
But the useful lesson from Kansas isn’t that any rate cut is reckless; it’s that you cannot responsibly cut taxes unless you are equally serious about spending restraint and real efficiencies — not just commissioning reports about them.
In short, Brownback never had a plan to balance the budget. Missouri does.
Patrick Tuohey is co-founder of Better Cities Project, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit focused on municipal policy solutions, and a senior fellow at the Show-Me Institute, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to Missouri state policy work.
This article originally appeared on Topeka Capital-Journal: What Missouri can learn from Sam Brownback’s budget crisis | Opinion
What Missouri can learn from Kansas’s budget crisis