kansas

Last week, both houses of the Kansas legislature approved a significant tax cut centered around replacing the state’s graduated rate income tax structure with a flat tax instead. The bulk of this would flow to upper-income families, mostly through lowering the state’s top income tax rate from 5.7 to 5.25 percent. This tax cut would be especially lucrative for the state’s wealthiest individual, billionaire Charles Koch. We estimate that Mr. Koch could expect to receive a tax cut in the neighborhood of $875,000 per year. As context, the median household income in Kansas is just shy of $70,000, meaning that Mr. Koch’s windfall would be the equivalent of more than 12 years’ worth of income for the typical Kansas household.

It bears noting that an $875,000 annual tax cut is more than 7,500 times larger than the $116 average tax cut that the middle 20 percent of earners could expect to receive under this legislation.