A story told to generate sympathy for working mothers at the expense of Kansas Governor Sam Brownback is based on arithmetic that is not plausible.
In the response to the State of the State Address, Senator Anthony Hensley told a tale of woe.
He said, according to the printed remarks “Take for example the single mother who works full time and lives within her means, but still struggles to provide for her family.”
That’s someone we can empathize with. And, someone who is a key Democratic Party constituent. Here’s the burden she faced under Brownback’s tax plan, according to Hensley:
“She paid $4,000 more in income taxes due to the Governor’s plan,”
When I heard him say that on television, I thought surely he had misread or misspoke. $4,000 in state income taxes is a lot of taxes. You have to have a pretty good income to have to pay $4,000 in Kansas state income taxes, much less to pay $4,000 more, as Hensely said. But $4,000 is in the prepared remarks as made available by the Kansas Democratic Party. You’d have to think that someone proofread and checked the senator’s arithmetic, wouldn’t you?
Here’s the arithmetic. According to the Kansas income tax tables for 2013, in order to owe $4,000 in tax, a person filing as single or head of household would have to have “Kansas taxable income” of $87,451. That number is after subtracting $2,250 for each exemption. Let’s say there are three exemptions, allowing for the mother and two children. That means that the person’s “Federal adjusted gross income” would be $94,201. When computing this figure, there are some “above the line” deductions from total income on the federal form 1040, but the most common deductions are after this.
So we can be quite sure that Hensley’s “single mother who works full time and lives within her means, but still struggles,” and who owes $4,000 in Kansas income tax, earns at least $94,201. In all likelihood she earned much more than that, because Hensley said she paid “$4,000 more” this year. If this fictional person saw her Kansas income tax bill rise to $6,000 from $2,000 — that’s an increase of $4,000 that Hensely used — her income would need to be $128,265. That’s before we increase it even more to account for deductions.
Of note, a justice on the Kansas Supreme Court earns $135,905. The U.S. Census Bureau has a statistic named “Median household income, 2009-2013.” For Kansas, the value is $51,332.
I’m not an income tax expert. I could be off by a little. But I’m pretty sure Anthony Hensley and the Kansas Democrats are way wrong on this.