Alan Cobb, State Director, Americans for Prosperity

Alan stated that the vision for AFP is greater economic growth, opportunity and prosperity through strong ethical foundations, government restraint, and private sector productivity and competition. The mission for AFP is to educate citizens about economic policy; mobilize citizens to achieve fiscal and regulatory restraint by state governments and a return of the federal government to its Constitutional limits.

AFP submitted its “Commonsense Budget Proposal” for fiscal year 2009. This proposal analyzes the past Kansas budgets and policies and proposes a new budget with policy changes that can be adopted for the future fiscally responsible budgets. The forward written by Dr. Barry Paulson begins, “At no other time in Kansas history have state and local governments imposed such a heavy tax burden on Kansas residents. This year, state and local taxes will capture 11.2 percent of the state’s income.” In the five state region only Nebraska has a higher taxes than Kansas. The sharp increase in taxes and debt have resulted in the deterioration in the state’s business tax climate. Again only Nebraska has a lower rating than Kansas. Although the income per capita has risen steadily in the last 26 years, it is still below the national average.

The fatal flaw underlying the structural deficit in the Kansas sate budget is uncontained growth in state spending. Over the last three decades, the growth in state spending has far outpaced the growth in personal income. Over that period, the compound annual rate of growth in expenditures from all funds increased 8 percent per year and the share of personal income increased from 9.1 to 12.5 percent.

The nine “R”s of fiscal responsibility are reform entitlement programs, require more user responsibility, redirect spending to higher-priority uses, reorganize state government, revive free enterprise, restore civil society and remove advocacy, waste and race-based programs, reshape the state-local government relationship and reduce biases in the tax code. This gives the Legislature the blue print to begin work. Copies of the proposed budget were available to those in attendance. Also this brochure can be obtained by calling AFP 785-354-4237 or down-loaded at http://americansforprosperity.org/ks/2008/AFP_Model_Budget.pdf

Mr. Cobb presented an information-laden power point that revealed how individual state programs have grown over the years out of proportion with the growth in population of those specific programs.

Mr. Cobb encouraged attendance at the “Defending the American Dream Summit” which will be held in Topeka on March 19, 2008.