How to win five dinner-table arguments with red-state relatives

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It’s often said that you’re not supposed to discuss politics or religion on a first date. In the Midwest, where politics and religion are often indistinguishable, the prohibition should extend to the Thanksgiving dinner table. That setting, for many families, can devolve into uncomfortable political debate when rarely seen relatives implore that they know what’s best. This year, you can count on a few of the more reliable political canards to pop up while carving the turkey. Rather than surrendering aimlessly, arm yourself with knowledge for the occasion.

The fib: Voter fraud is rampant in Kansas. 

The perpetrator: Who else? Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach has been the nation’s leading carnival barker on election-fraud issues. When Kobach isn’t working in Kansas, he’s traveling to other states to help craft and defend anti-immigration and voter-fraud cases, even though the number of actual cases is minuscule.

Why it sounds good: Sometimes voter fraud is an issue. In Kansas City, Missouri, a Missouri House race was decided in favor of John Rizzo when two of his family members illegally voted in the 2012 election and gave him the edge in a one-vote decision against Will Royster. 

Why the logic fails: Voter fraud is not much of an issue in Kansas. Even Kobach admits this. In testimony before the Kansas Legislature in January, he said 20 non–Kansas residents had managed to register to vote in the Sunflower State. Of that group, only five had cast ballots.

Yet Kobach-inspired policies have delayed 22,000 first-time voter applications in Kansas. Kobach told The New York Times in October: “Every time an alien votes, it cancels out the vote of a United States citizen.” But Kobach’s policies have had a disproportionate effect on black voters reaching the polls, according to a Government Accountability Office report published in September.

The bottom line: Voter fraud is imperceptibly small, if it exists at all. But Kobach soldiers on.

The fib: Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback has increased K-12 education funding in Kansas.

The perpetrators: Brownback and his budget director, Shawn Sullivan, who said several times during the just-ended gubernatorial campaign that the current administration has been kind to public education, even amid steep tax cuts.

Why it sounds good: It’s politically disastrous to hurt schools. Parents don’t want to send their kids to crummy schools, and people who don’t have kids don’t want to own property in places where crummy schools exist. That’s why Brownback was compelled to make the case that his administration had increased funding to schools since he took office in 2010.

Why the logic fails: Brownback is mixing some numbers into his equation that goose the apparent spending levels on schoolchildren, but some of that money never hits classrooms.

For years, education spending was tracked every year by calculating the state’s base aid per pupil. It’s not a perfect measurement — it leaves out the amount of money that districts can raise locally to supplement their funding. But it’s a useful way to analyze the state’s commitment to education funding, and courts have found the number persuasive. Before Brownback took office, base aid per pupil was $4,400. For the 2014 fiscal year, that level dropped to $3,838.

Now let’s add some numbers from other state funding sources, like supplemental state aid and contributions to pension plans. Before Brownback took office, total state general funding to education was $3.15 billion; in 2014, it was $2.98 billion. But using figures such as pensions, which don’t go to classroom education, is a convoluted way of looking at education finance. Brownback can hang his hat on the fact that total funding of education actually went up in 2014 compared with 2009 — but then he’s using federal allocations to pad the stats.

Bottom line: Part of the increase in education funding for which Brownback claimed credit was a Kansas Supreme Court–mandated order to contribute $130 million more to the finance formula so that the state would do a better job of equalizing funding from one school district to the next. Sure, the increase happened while he was governor, but it wasn’t his idea.

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The fib: Kansas government, like Kansas families, must learn to live within its means.

The perpetrator: Shawn Sullivan, Kansas budget director, recently explained away another month of dismal government-revenue receipts with a populist appeal: “The state of Kansas must continue to live within its means, just as families do every day.” The statement was an attempt to brush aside concerns that Kansas continues to plummet into fiscal ruin.

Why it sounds good: Everyone understands that a family has to pay its mortgage to keep a roof over its head, pay the electric bill to keep the lights on, and pay the water company so that faucets don’t go dry. Why should government be any different?

Why the logic fails: Everyone also understands that workers in Kansas and anywhere else don’t go to their bosses and say, “I could use less money. Cut my earnings, please.”

That’s essentially what Kansas did by way of Brownback’s tax cuts. Small companies, and even some large ones, pay no income tax at all. The result is a significant drop in state revenues. But expenses keep going up.

An argument can be made that waste occurs in government and that there’s room to tighten the belt, just as in any household. There’s also a reasonable case to be made that government could be smaller and still function. But to continue along Sullivan’s analogy, Kansas government isn’t running up tabs at the bars every night after going out for a steak dinner with all the trimmings. Kansas government has run a lean budget ever since the recent recession, which is why moderate Republicans were able to gather enough votes in 2010 to raise the state sales tax from 5.7 percent to 6.3 percent in order to keep businesses running.

The sales-tax rate was supposed to drop back to 5.7 percent last year, but Brownback signed a measure to keep the sales tax at 6.15 percent. The move was effectively a tax increase that he and fellow conservatives managed to call a tax cut.

Still, it’s not as though there are a lot of places where Kansas government can cut expenses. Some expenses, as in any household, are more or less fixed. While Kansas families can’t just tell the electric company that they wish to pay only half of their monthly bills, Kansas government can’t cut into Medicaid (20 percent of the Kansas budget). Education is 50 percent of the budget, but Kansas courts generally believe that a minimum level of funding is required for K-12 education, so cuts there can go only so far.

Bottom line: Kansas government lives more like a family below the poverty line that refuses food stamps than like a household in which the parents have money to pay for cable while the roof leaks.

The fib: Lower income taxes will improve state economies.

The perpetrator: Brownback pulled the lever in 2012 on steep, unprecedented state income-tax cuts that lowered rates for most businesses and eliminated them outright for 191,000 businesses structured as limited liability corporations and Subchapter S corporations. The governor himself described it as an experiment.

Why it sounds good: The thinking behind these tax cuts is simple. Return more money to the pockets of taxpayers and let them stimulate the economy with increased spending, and in the case of small companies, let them hire more employees. And worry not about how the state will operate its offices; it’s time to starve the inefficient beast of government.

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Why the logic fails: Businesses hire employees if they need them, not because they have extra money sitting around. Brownback engineered his tax policy as a means to speed the recovery of a sluggish Kansas economy. At first, he described his policy as a shot of adrenaline. Adrenaline acts quickly, and its effects are pronounced. When the Kansas economy didn’t perk up, Brownback changed his tune, saying improvements to the economy would be gradual, similar to the time that it takes to recover from surgery.

But in key economic indicators, what’s happening instead is decay.

Child poverty is increasing, unemployment is lessening at a slower rate than that of surrounding states, and disposable income growth is lagging behind Oklahoma and Nebraska (among other competing economies). The Kansas Legislative Research Department projects slower growth in Kansans’ personal income over the next three years compared with the rest of the United States’ population. Kansas is looking at a $1 billion budget hole over the next two years. Businesses may like lower tax bills, but they also need some semblance of a functioning government and an educated workforce.

Bottom line: Brownback’s tax policy was the defining topic of the 2014 election. Kansans re-elected Brownback, so they presumably understand what they’re in for.

The fib: It’s cold outside, so there’s no such thing as global warming.

The (local) perpetrator: U.S. Rep. Vicky Hartzler, Missouri’s 4th District congresswoman and a tea party stalwart, took to Twitter at the tail end of November’s cold snap to observe that chilliness refutes scientific evidence of climate change — “Global warming strikes America! Brrr!”

It’s possible that Hartzler was having some social-media fun and trolling followers, but she has been an ardent opponent of the Clean Air Act, co-sponsoring legislation that would remove greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and others from the legal definition of the term “air pollutant.”

Why it sounds good: Winter is always a good time for climate-change deniers to look at the snow in their backyards and tell themselves and others that cold weather proves global warming is junk science. 

Why the logic fails: Weather is not climate. The temperature is just one of several indicators that the global climate is, on average, getting warmer. Ragweed-pollen season, for example, shows the effects of warmer temperatures and delayed frosts. In Kansas City, the length of ragweed-pollen season has increased by 18 days since 1995. If Hartzler had an allergy to ragweed, climate change would explain why she bought more Benadryl.

And if the recent cold snap had Hartzler putting on more layers, it might help her to know that climate change exacerbates the extremes in weather conditions, both hot and cold. In Kansas City, the average November temperature from 1972 to 2000 hovered around 42.4 degrees Fahrenheit. But the trend line since 1980 shows that the average temperature went from 42 degrees to about 45.5 degrees in 2013. This year’s cold snap might bring that average down for one year, but the pattern for more than 30 years shows that Kansas City, and the rest of the world, is getting warmer, not colder.

Bottom line: Don’t take our word for it. There are any number of places where you can find evidence to support global warming. One handy site is the National Climatic Data Center. At ncdc.noaa.gov/cag, you can get custom charts on weather data. They will all show a trend toward warmer weather and declining precipitation.