Kansas Tax Cuts Success Hidden in Plain Sight: Jonathan Williams on American Radio Journal

For more than a decade, a convenient myth has circulated among pundits and policymakers across the nation, and that is that Kansas, under former Governor Sam Brownback, tried a bold tax-cutting experiment and somehow failed. The myth goes something like this: cut taxes, and then a destruction of your state will surely follow.

But this very tall tale, so often repeated by some in state capitals and editorial pages, falls apart under even the most modest scrutiny. It’s not a lesson in economics; it’s a case study in how false narratives can outpace facts. The so-called Kansas experiment began more than a decade ago, in 2012, when the state passed a series of income tax cuts which were rightly aimed at spurring economic growth and eventually eliminating the personal income tax altogether.

It started out as a move toward smaller government and increased economic freedom—goals that have underpinned massive growth and economic prosperity in states like Tennessee, Texas, and Florida, just to name a few. But there’s one glaring problem with this Kansas tale: the tax cuts were only part of the story, and they were never fully implemented as intended. Unfortunately, the legislation Kansas enacted wasn’t close to the original effort from Governor Brownback and conservative legislators, so it was not anywhere close to a true test of pro-growth tax reform.

Due to liberal legislators leading the Kansas Senate at that time, many of the so-called pay-fors in the legislation were eliminated, and the session adjourned with large increases in government spending. That’s, of course, an unbalanced approach that ignores the basic fiscal principle that both sides of the government ledger matter. No serious economist would argue that slashing revenue while simultaneously inflating spending is a sustainable fiscal model, and yet that’s exactly what happened in Kansas.

But the critics of the plan never told those facts of the story. Had Kansas coupled its tax cuts with meaningful reductions in spending, or at least controlled the rate of growth, the story would have turned out much differently. But when deficits emerged, the political appetite for spending reform collapsed. By 2017, the state passed the largest tax hike in history just to fund the massive appetite for spending from the political class, and of course, that undid much of what had been attempted just a few years earlier.

The usual suspects in the media and academia quickly seized on this, declaring the experiment a failure. Progressive economists like Paul Krugman pointed out Kansas as definitive proof that somehow tax cuts don’t spur economic growth. But that’s not economic analysis; that’s ideological opportunism.

In reality, the Kansas story teaches us something much more basic: you cannot cut taxes and ignore spending. Fiscal discipline is not optional; it’s the other half of the equation. What’s often left out of the Kansas narrative is what happened in other states that learned from these mistakes—not by avoiding tax reform, but by doing it right.

Take North Carolina, for example. It enacted a series of tax cuts over the last decade, including the creation of a flat tax and a plan to phase out its business income tax altogether. Unlike Kansas, it also reined in spending and reformed its budget process. The result: economic growth, job creation, massive in-migration of residents from other states, and a thriving state economy.

Arkansas, too, has steadily lowered its top income tax rates every year since 2019 while maintaining fiscal responsibility. In 2025, Mississippi and Oklahoma passed plans to phase out their personal income taxes entirely. These are not theoretical debates; they are real-world counterexamples to the Kansas myth ignored by those who find them politically inconvenient.

The notion that Kansas invalidated the benefits of pro-growth tax reform is not only misleading, it is intellectually dishonest. The state never fully implemented the tax cut plan; it abandoned the reform midway through and returned to the old model of tax-and-spend politics. The so-called failure was a failure of execution and political will, not of good economic policy.

The good news this year from Kansas is that pro-growth tax reform came full circle and was enacted—over the objections of liberal Governor Laura Kelly, but under the leadership of Senate President Ty Masterson, Speaker Dan Hawkins, and Majority Leader Chris Croft. The state enacted legislation to provide real tax relief and move to a flat tax on personal income.

In short, the Kansas experiment is no longer an experiment. It is a distorted story used to shut down debate, devoid of nuance or economic context. If there’s a lesson to be learned, it’s not that tax cuts are doomed to fail, but that politicians must have the courage to match tax policy with commonsensical spending restraint.

As with all things in economics, there are no magic bullets, only trade-offs. Those who ignore that reality will keep recycling the same myths. Those who learn from it may finally write a different story. Thankfully, Kansas wrote a much more positive story for taxpayers this year.