Let Them Eat Cake . . . But NO Ice Cream!

Last month in this space, we teed off on consumer choices that contribute to the current once-in-two-generations inflationary spike.

Now let’s take a little stroll down Data Dump Drive and see what’s taking place in the state capitals. My hunch is that, if you try to get as granular as we have here with quarterly tax tables provided by the Census Bureau, you’ll start to wonder why it feels like an even bigger thumb is coming down on the butcher’s scale of your monthly budget.

Stick with me here, because this will get a little dense at times. Sure as shinola stinks, though, that’s precisely the response the bean-counters and lever-pullers behind the curtains are hoping for from the electorate. 

Slight diversionary note: One of the reasons the average taxpayer can’t get simple answers to basic questions about where the money goes is because governments at all levels have discovered the wonders of obfuscation. Municipal, county and state budget documents these days run into the hundreds of pages. Kansas City’s current fiscal-year budget document weighs in at a tidy 691 pages. That’s before you add in the police department’s 265 pages.

Johnson County’s budget on the Kansas side is a sveldt 527 pages. Overland Park goes 344 pages with its document. The Lee’s Summit School District, which evidently hasn’t stumbled onto the benefits of such obscurity, runs a tidy 57 pages. Suitable, perhaps, for reading to your kids as a bedtime story.

But back to the inflation angle. Over the past three years, you’ve had a chance to grouse about escalating prices for everything from hamburger to Hamburger Helper, chocolate to chocolate-cake mix, cheese to Cheesy Poofs. According to the Consumer Price Index, the onset of the pandemic, supply-chain disruptions and the subsequent cascade of federal Monopoly money, what cost you $10 in December of 2019 runs $11.70 today—up 17 percent in 36 months.

On the public-policy side, this is where things get interesting. Take sales taxes, just one thread in a tangled weave of revenue sources that feed the beasts in Jefferson City and Topeka. Without lawmakers having lifted a finger to raise taxes, higher nominal prices for the things you buy—not just groceries, but cars (new and used), appliances (how the hell did refrigerators start going for two grand?), tires, paint or yard mulch—all of it boosted the bottom line on sales taxes for each state. As it has for cities and counties. But there’s a word limit with this commentary, so we’ll confine ourselves to the Capitol buildings for the moment.

Between 2019 and the end of 2022, the Census folks tell us, Missouri sales tax collections went from $3.81 billion to $4.32 billion—an increase of nearly $506.9 million. In Kansas, sales tax revenues jumped even more, proportionally, throwing off an additional $498.16 million.

One would have to look upon public-sector budgeting with the heart of a Scrooge to deny that budget authorities and elected officials in each state aren’t subject to the same cost inputs as the rest of us. They surely are. But keep this in mind: the monster is a lot bigger than just sales taxes. 

Property tax collections in Kansas over that same span were up 45.8 percent (from $753 million to $1.1 billion); on the Missouri  side, it was 10.6 percent, but the warnings are out from county assessors that 30-percent increases are coming this year for many. (Of course, if they had any moral fiber at all, those executives would simply roll back the corresponding mill levies and provide a little hold-harmless action for homeowners, but that’s a separate rant.)

Throw in the motor fuels tax, the levy on alcoholic beverages, vehicle licensing taxes and two dozen other lines, and you get Kansas going from $10.24 billion in total tax receipts to $12.86 billion (up 11.5 percent), while Missouri rocketed from $13.4 billion to $16.68 billion (up 24.48 percent). In three years. About the only good thing you can say there is that Kansas at least came in under the 15 percent inflation rate for that span. Missouri fell a bit short of doubling it. Come on, all you fiscal conservatives in the General Assembly! Try harder next time!

Think about some of those numbers the next time you want to treat your spouse and another couple to a mid-price dinner with a tab of $100—laughable, I know, because even the low-end joints command that much these days. You lay out the hundred, you play nice and dish the server a 20 percent tip.

Then the ghost of Harry Truman or Alf Landon plunges a skeletal hand into your pocket for another 10 bucks, to be divided by the state, city, county and a few others who have managed to pull up a seat at your table.

What can we say? Bon apetit to all who voted for this. You might consider it your just dessert.