Opinion

GUEST COLUMN, Shannon Francis, 125th District Representative

We celebrated Pancake Day this week at the Capitol. It was the best one ever! Joining us were the Junior Ambassadors from the Liberal Recreation Department Dance Classes. They were a big hit with everyone at the Capitol. I want to thank the Ambassadors’ parents for bringing them, the City of Liberal, the International Pancake Day Board, and Liberal’s Tourism Department for sponsoring and attending the pancake feed. This is a popular event that everyone looks forward to.

In conjunction with Local Government Day and Pancakes at the Capitol, Keeley Young, with the City of Liberal was in Topeka advocating for our community with numerous state agencies. Thanks for all you do, Keeley.

It was nice to visit with Zoey Svaty this week. She is an impressive young lady who is smart and well spoken. Her Dad, Eli, was in town for meetings with the Western Kansas Regional Economic Development Assoc. (WKREDA). Congratulations, Eli, on some of your recently announced economic development projects.

L&T Publisher Earl Watt

Thomas Jefferson once said, “The government you elect is the government you deserve.”

I would very much like to ask Jefferson about electing representatives who make promises to do one thing and then do another, but his point is well taken. Only by knowing the intentions of those we elect can we ever be able to predict if they will safeguard the will of the people.

Recently we discovered that the answer is not always.

But for better or worse, our system provided enough of an opportunity to demand change, and thanks to the cooperation of the former commissioners abdicating their positions, the way was cleared for new leadership who decided not to defend the massive 17 mill tax increase.

About a week ago there was a meeting with the Kansas Board of Tax Appeals that helped pave the way to not only support the new Seward County Commission in its efforts to return to Revenue Neutral, but also to work with the citizens who disagreed with the use of the process to determine the correct rate.

THE POSTSCRIPT, Carrie Classon

There’s a reason I don’t write about current events.

The news flies at me faster than I can absorb. I cannot make sense of it all, and it feels as if I should always be doing something more, knowing more, helping more than I am.

The parable in the Bible that made the biggest impact on me as a child was the story Jesus told of how, when the master went away, he gave his servants talents to safeguard. Of course, in the literal sense, a talent was a large amount of money, but as a child, I took it to mean exactly as the parable implied — some kind of ability I might have.

I didn’t want to be that servant who stuck his talents in the ground and did nothing with them. Those talents didn’t do any good. They didn’t grow. They didn’t help anyone. I promised myself (at eight or nine years old) I wouldn’t make the mistake of that foolish servant. I’d make use of whatever I’d been given.

GUEST COLUMN, Vance Ginn, Kansas Policy Institute

Kansas does not have a revenue problem. It has a spending discipline problem, and the state has learned this lesson the hard way before.

Governor Laura Kelly’s proposed $10.8 billion state general fund budget for fiscal year 2027 spends roughly $640 million more than projected revenues. That follows last year’s budget, which administration officials acknowledged spent about $700 million more than the state collected, continuing a pattern of structural imbalance rather than restraint.

Supporters of the budget argue that spending growth is modest at about 1.6 percent year over year. That argument misses the point. The real problem is not the growth rate today. It is that spending was never brought back down after the pandemic-era surge. Emergency lockdown spending permanently inflated the budget baseline, and lawmakers accepted that excess as the new normal.

Basic Econ 101 teaches that governments do not create resources. They redistribute them. And unlike Washington, states cannot print money. When Kansas spends more than it collects, the bill comes due in only two ways: higher taxes now or higher taxes later. There is no third option.