GUEST COLUMN, Dave Trabert, Kansas Policy Institute

Every government entity needs cash reserves to some degree, but holding $6 billion among Kansas counties and Class A cities is arguably far too much, and that’s one cause of excessive property taxation.

We examined the 2026 budgets for the state’s 105 counties and the 25 cities with populations of 15,000 or more, identified the beginning unencumbered cash reserves in each fund as of January 1, 2024, and compared each entity’s total to its 2024 expenditures.  Collectively, those entities began 2024 with about $4.2 billion in budgeted cash reserves and about $1.8 billion in non-budgeted cash reserves, and they spent $8.2 billion. On average, they had 73 percent of the coming year’s expenses already in the bank.

GUEST COLUMN, Star Parker

I’m far from understanding chatbots, chips, and AI technology, but I’ve worked in D.C. long enough to be suspicious when industry giants come begging for government regulations.

In the September 2026 essay “We Must Pace the Frontier,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says that AI “could dramatically raise the quality of human life” but that it “brings risks, and because it is such a powerful technology, these risks are serious.” He advocated “pacing the rate of capabilities advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up.”

GUEST COLUMN, Chuck Voelker, Kansas Farm Bureau

Sept. 21 through 25 is National Farm Safety and Health Week. To help honor this, I thought I’d share a true experience that happened to me a few years ago. I was fortunate that day, and the experience was a good reminder that there’s no such thing as being too careful around farm equipment.

They called me to say it was my turn to use a fertilizer spreader. It was supposed to rain the next day; the timing could not have been better.

I drove the truck to town to fetch a load of nitrogen to spread upon my pasture so the grass could thrive again.

The tractor’s ignition switch had not been working for quite some time. I’d been using a screwdriver on the starter and getting along just fine.

GUEST COLUMN, Vance Ginn, Kansas Policy Institute

Kansas went from leading the nation in economic growth to growing at less than half the national rate in just two quarters. That should get every Kansas policymaker’s attention.

Kansas real GDP surged 6.5 percent at an annual rate in the third quarter of 2025, the fastest growth in the country and well above the 4.4 percent U.S. rate. By the first quarter of 2026, however, Kansas real GDP growth had slowed to just 1.0 percent, compared with 2.1 percent nationally.

There’s good news in the latest Kansas economy. But these swings are a reminder that one great quarter, especially one heavily influenced by agriculture, isn’t the same thing as sustained economic growth. And sustained growth is what Kansas needs to compete for workers, families, businesses, and investment.