Kansas Republicans plan to cut the corporate tax rate to zero. Did they tell you? | Opinion

Ever notice how Kansas Republicans never, ever tell us what their fiscal agenda is?

Think back two years: We heard a lot from GOP candidates in 2022 about drag queens, transgender athletes and other culture war hot topics. But did anybody run on passing a flat tax — a plan to ensure that you pay the same rate as billionaire Charles Koch?

If so, they kept it quiet.

Of course, the flat tax ended up being one of the GOP’s top priorities once they secured supermajority control of both the Kansas House and the Kansas Senate in that year’s election. We’ve spent the last two legislative sessions watching Senate President Ty Masterson and House Speaker Dan Hawkins try to ram through their billionaire giveaway.

Luckily, we had Gov. Laura Kelly standing by with her veto pen.

This is worth mentioning right now because Kansas Republicans have a bright new idea that — oops! — they forgot to mention to voters who are deciding if the GOP will once again be given supermajority control of the Kansas Legislature.

We know this thanks to fantastic reporting from the Kansas Reflector, which dug up recordings of House Majority Leader Chris Croft previewing his party’s agenda to Johnson County Republicans.

During private Zoom calls in May, what he told them is decidedly not what GOP candidates have been telling folks when they knock on neighborhood doors as they campaign for election this November.

The goal for legislators next year, Croft said in the recordings, is “reducing the corporate tax rate overall with the intent to drive it to zero.”

A bill to accomplish that has previously been introduced in the House, Croft said. “I think what you’re going to see next year is that bill being done.”

Croft didn’t respond to inquiries from The Kansas City Star.

It would have been nice if he had told the rest of us. But “zero corporate tax rate” hasn’t appeared on any GOP yard signs, as far as I can tell.

It’s been a few years since I took a civics class, but I don’t think that’s how this thing we call “representative democracy” is supposed to work.

Ideally, candidates run for office telling you what they want to do when they get into office. Then, if they win, they try to do the thing they told you they would do. And then everybody gets to judge if it’s good or not.

The only way this actually works is if everybody is honest about what they want. Candidates have to tell voters their agenda. Voters have to let them know if it’s acceptable or not.

Butt doesn’t work very well if candidates — and let’s be direct here: Republican candidates — hide their intentions. Or if they only share them with a few voters they already know are friendly. Then the system starts to break a little bit.

Which sure looks like what is happening here.

It starts to make you think that Kansas Republicans aren’t so confident their actual agenda would be popular with voters in (checks notes) a heavily Republican state. Especially a state where GOP voters helped turn back the tax-cutting foolishness of the Sam Brownback era.

Driving the corporate tax rate to “zero” doesn’t exactly scream “populist party of the working class,” does it?

Maybe — just maybe — that’s why Republican candidates spend so much time screaming their heads off about transgender kids.

Listen: I genuinely don’t know if a zeroed-out corporate tax rate would be good for Kansas or not. I suspect not. “We’re not kidding when we say they truly want to take us back to the Brownback years,” state Rep. Rui Xu, a Johnson County Democrat, posted online Friday after the Reflector story broke.

Maybe there’s a case to be made, though.

Majority Leader Croft should make it if he can, if his proposal isn’t simply a sellout to big businesses.

And all the other Republican candidates running for the Legislature — many of whom will presumably be taking their marching orders from Croft — should go on the record before the election about whether they agree with him or not.

Kansas voters deserve to know what their elected officials intend to do next year. And they need to know now. It’s not too late for Republicans to finally tell them.

Joel Mathis is a regular Kansas City Star and Wichita Eagle Opinion correspondent. Formerly a writer and editor at Kansas newspapers, he served nine years as a syndicated columnist.