Members of the Kansas House Taxation Committee are expected to begin working as early as today on rival plans for reducing the state’s income tax rates. There have been hearings already.
House Speaker Mike O’Neal spoke with us Saturday after a public forum over the differences they’re looking at as to what the governor proposed in his state budget.
The main difference is that the house would let the 1-cent sales tax past a few years ago, and would make up the difference by delaying some of the payments to the T-Works fund, which is for the improvements to various highway projects around the state.
The house speaker provided us with information of how highways would be effected. In the printed information, he sites the fact that K-DOT would not receive extra T-Works funds of the 1-cent sales tax had not passed into law.
He says the 18.421 percent of sales and use tax to K-DOT in the 2010 legislation will be delayed for two years until fiscal 2016. He says funding will stay at current levels of 320-million for two years, then will increase to the current statutory levels provided in the 2010 legislation.
The new house tax plan will also keep in place the current statutory tax deductions, credits and exemptions, including the food sales tax refund, historic tax credits, and mortgage deduction.
He also argues their plan will assist lower income Kansans, saying under their proposed plan, it would lower the tax liability of the zero to 25-thousand dollar tax bracket to paying 11-dollars less, while the governor’s plan has the lowest tax bracket paying 156-dollars more in income taxes.
He says the house version will keep the current tax brackets, but will reduce each one.
The house plan also keeps the elimination of individual income tax on non-wage business income for the LLC’s, S-Corps and sole proprietorship’s, but the elimination would be capped at 100-thousand dollars for fiscal years, 2013-through 2015, 250-thousand for fiscal years 2016 through 2017, and no cap after that.
There has been some question on whether the house plan would hurt funding for highway projects through what is known as T-Works. The House speaker brought up during the public forum and again to us that T-Works doesn’t loose any funding with their plan.
Some of the other other topics brought up during Saturday’s forum, were the dinners at the Governor’s Mansion, that some suggest may have violated the open meetings act, but everyone at the forum Saturday didn’t believe that was the case, including Democrat Jan Pauls.
Also present were State Senator Terry Bruce, and State Representatives Joe Seiwart, and Bob Bethel.