Originally published on Substack. 

New York City’s latest budget fight should grab the attention of lawmakers across the country. When spending grows without guardrails, taxpayers become the contingency plan.
​
NYC Mayor Mamdani and City Hall is floating a 9.5% property-tax rate hike projected to raise about $3.7 billion in FY2027 if state lawmakers don’t approve higher taxes on wealthy residents and corporations, according to the city’s own FY2027 preliminary budget release.

The message is straightforward: allow new “tax the rich” authority, or brace for a major property-tax increase.
That’s clever politics. It’s poor economics.

The same budget documents show a $5.4 billion two-year gap, even after announced savings and revised revenue projections.

The plan also leans on nearly $1 billion from a rainy-day reserve in FY2026 and hundreds of millions more from a retiree health trust in FY2027 to technically balance the books. Those are temporary tools being used to manage a structural budget imbalance.

This isn’t a revenue problem; it’s a spending problem.

Property taxes are not some neutral lever. They don’t land on “the system.” They land on people. When local reporting notes that higher property taxes will flow into higher rents and higher living costs, that’s not partisan commentary. It’s how cost pass-through works.

Landlords incorporate higher tax bills into rents. Commercial property owners build those costs into prices. Small businesses raise fees to stay afloat.

Even families who don’t own homes feel it.

The framing of “tax the rich or raise property taxes” creates a false choice. Either way, the private economy gets squeezed to sustain an expanding government. And when the baseline for spending keeps rising, the tax debate becomes permanent.

This pattern isn’t unique to New York. It’s a common model in local government:

1. Expand recurring spending commitments.
2. Assume steady or optimistic revenue growth.
3. When projections soften, propose tax increases.

Property taxes are especially attractive to local officials because they’re stable and difficult to avoid. You can relocate income or consumption more easily than real estate. That makes property taxes politically convenient. It also makes them a disaster economically.

For lawmakers, the lesson is simple: if spending growth isn’t limited, taxes will climb. It’s not ideological. It’s arithmetic. When expenditures grow faster than population growth and inflation over time, the gap compounds.
Eventually, officials argue that tax hikes are unavoidable to protect “essential services.” But what’s essential is rarely defined with discipline.

A more durable approach would focus on structural reforms:

• Cut spending and enact growth limits of less than population growth plus inflation.
• Stop relying on one-time reserves to cover recurring costs.
• Conduct independent, private sector efficiency audits of programs and redirect funds toward measurable outcomes or even better back to taxpayers through lower tax rates.
• Reduce regulatory barriers that drive up housing and business costs, allowing supply and competition to relieve pressure instead of tax increases.

Property taxes also raise a deeper concern about ownership.

When tax bills rise year after year to sustain ever-expanding budgets, ownership becomes conditional. You may hold the deed, but your ability to remain in your home depends on your capacity to keep pace with government growth. That’s not a stable foundation for long-term prosperity.

There’s also a governance issue. Tax authority is supposed to be transparent and accountable.

When executives frame tax hikes as inevitable unless other governments approve alternative levies, accountability becomes blurred. The debate shifts from “How large should government be?” to “Which tax should rise?”

That’s the wrong starting point.

New York City’s budget discussion is a reminder that affordability challenges often stem from fiscal policy choices, not market forces. Before asking taxpayers for billions more, local leaders should ask whether spending commitments have outpaced sustainable growth.

Lawmakers elsewhere would be wise to pay attention. Without clear fiscal guardrails, every government eventually faces the same crossroads: expand taxes or draw down reserves.

The better path is spending discipline now, not pressure later. When spending has limits, taxpayers aren’t treated as the fallback option. And when government lives within sustainable growth, families and businesses have room to prosper.
​
Because in the end, if spending has no ceiling, taxpayers’ wallets become the ceiling. And they feel the pressure first.

Originally published on Substack. 

​If you only look at Kansas’s unemployment rate, you might think everything is fine. That’s the political trap: point to a low number, declare victory, and move on. 

But the latest state labor and economic output data show a more complicated truth. Kansas has real strengths, but it’s also leaving growth on the table because Topeka keeps flirting with bigger-government drift instead of locking in a durable, rules-based pro-growth agenda.
​
The newest state labor-market table shows Kansas’s unemployment rate at 3.8% in December 2025, below the national 4.4%. That’s a competitive advantage, especially when the federal policy environment is highly erratic. But the last 12 months reveal why “steady” is not the same thing as “surging.”

Over the past year, Kansas’s labor force grew from 1,554,666 in December 2024 to 1,572,551 in December 2025. That’s an increase of 17,885 people, which is a healthy sign that Kansans stayed in, or entered, the workforce rather than sitting on the sidelines. Meanwhile, the number of unemployed Kansans edged up from 59,082 to 59,742, an increase of 660, while the unemployment rate stayed flat at 3.8%.

Here’s what that combination usually means. Kansas absorbed a larger labor force without letting joblessness rise much. That’s good. But it also suggests job growth is not accelerating fast enough to pull the unemployment count down meaningfully even as more people participate. In other words, Kansas is holding its ground, not separating from the pack.

And Kansas is very much in a pack. In December 2025, Kansas’s 3.8% matched Colorado at 3.8%, came in slightly better than Missouri at 3.9%, and remained above Nebraska at 3.0%. Kansas can’t build a growth strategy around “we’re about average for the region.”

Now zoom out from jobs to output, because this is where Kansas has a real bragging right. In the latest state GDP release, Kansas posted the fastest real GDP growth in the country in the third quarter of 2025: 6.5% at an annual rate, versus 4.4% nationally.

​Washington never runs out of ideas for spending money it doesn’t have.

This episode of the Let People Prosper Show takes on one of the latest examples: so-called “Trump Accounts.” Marketed as a pro-family, pro-capitalism idea, they’re actually another case of federal social engineering through the tax code—layered on top of an already broken fiscal foundation.

To unpack it all, I sat down with Veronique de Rugy, one of the sharpest and most honest fiscal minds in America. She’s the George Gibbs Chair in Political Economy at the Mercatus Center and a nationally syndicated columnist who has spent her career calling out budget gimmicks, cronyism, and policies that trade long-term prosperity for short-term politics.

She was last on the show in Episode 102, discussing immigration and American values. This time, we dive into deficits, tariffs, inflation, entitlement pressure, and why Washington’s obsession with using the tax code to “fix” social problems often makes things worse.

🎧 Watch or listen to the full episode on ⁠YouTube⁠, ⁠Apple Podcast,⁠ or ⁠Spotify⁠, and visit ⁠my website vanceginn.com⁠ for more information about my work at Ginn Economic Consulting.

Originally posted on Substack. 

​The federal government “shut down” at the end of January 2026, then reopened on February 3 after Congress passed a $1.2 trillion spending package that keeps most agencies funded through September. If you blinked, you probably missed the impact.

That is the point. For most families and businesses, daily life barely changed. Washington staged a high-drama budget fight, then “fixed” it with a giant bill and another deadline. Meanwhile, the real crisis keeps compounding: a federal government that spends too much, borrows too much, and relies on institutions like the Federal Reserve to absorb the consequences.

Congress ended the shutdown by passing an omnibus-style deal. The House vote was a razor-thin 217–214, and the bill included back pay for furloughed federal employees. That ended the second shutdown in four months, but it did not end the dysfunction.

The bill also left one massive loose end. The Department of Homeland Security was funded only through February 13, 2026, setting up another deadline that could trigger another lapse. That includes big, everyday functions like TSA airport screening, FEMA disaster response, and border and immigration enforcement.

The fight is now over whether Congress will attach new restrictions on DHS operations, with both sides already signaling they may force another showdown. You can read the basic structure of what agencies do during a lapse in the government’s own shutdown planning documents.
So what was accomplished?

A shutdown is not a spending cut. It is a temporary lapse in discretionary funding when lawmakers fail to pass appropriations bills. Discretionary means Congress votes on it each year. In contrast, mandatory spending like Social Security and Medicare largely runs on autopilot under existing law.

Even during a shutdown, many mandatory payments continue, many federal activities continue, and the federal government’s debt meter keeps running.

That is why a shutdown is mostly political theater. It interrupts some services, creates uncertainty, and turns federal workers into pawns. But it does not fix the budget, and it does not address the actual fiscal math.

The real fiscal math is ugly. The United States is carrying roughly $38 trillion in gross federal debt, which is the total amount of Treasury obligations outstanding. On top of that sits a mountain of unfunded liabilities, which is a polite phrase for promises already made for future benefits without dedicated funding set aside to pay for them.

People can argue about the exact size of those unfounded liabilities depending on assumptions, but the direction is unmistakable: the federal government has promised far more than it can pay without much higher taxes, major reforms, less spending, or significant inflationary financing.

Now connect that back to this shutdown “solution.” Congress kept most agencies funded through September. It might avoid a weekend of headlines, but it does nothing to slow the long-term spending trajectory that drives debt higher year after year.

And as debt gets bigger, interest costs become a budget-eater. When you owe $38 trillion, even small interest-rate moves matter. A one percentage point increase in average borrowing costs across a large portion of federal debt quickly translates into hundreds of billions more in annual interest expense over time.

That is money taxpayers send out the door before funding national defense, infrastructure, or tax relief. It is also money that crowds out private investment, because capital gets pulled into financing government IOUs instead of productive private activity.

This is why the Federal Reserve keeps getting pulled into fiscal failure.

When Congress will not control spending, markets start asking whether the Fed will be pressured to keep rates lower than they should be, or to buy more government debt to stabilize borrowing costs. That practice is often called monetizing the debt, meaning the central bank creates money to purchase government bonds. It can suppress rates in the short run, but it distorts markets and can contribute to inflation risks over time if money growth outpaces real economic output.

The Fed’s balance sheet is a major part of this story. A balance sheet is simply the Fed’s assets and liabilities, mainly the Treasury and mortgage bonds it holds, and the bank reserves it creates. Keeping that balance sheet huge can keep market signals muted and misprice risk. Shrinking it restores more market discipline, but it can also push some interest rates higher in the short run.

That is why Fed leadership matters, especially if the goal is to shrink the balance sheet toward something closer to historical norms, rather than living permanently in emergency-mode policy. If the Fed remains a quiet backstop for federal borrowing, Congress has even less incentive to make hard choices.

To be clear, “spending causes inflation” is too simplistic. Inflation is ultimately a monetary phenomenon: too much money chasing too few goods. But excessive federal spending absolutely pressures the Fed into choices that can amplify inflation risks, especially when deficits are persistent and political leaders want cheap financing. Fiscal irresponsibility and monetary distortion feed each other.

And this is not just a Washington problem.

Look at Texas as a warning sign. Texas does not have a personal income tax, which is a major competitive advantage. But spending discipline still matters, because spending is the ultimate burden of government. If spending grows faster than taxpayers can sustain, the bill shows up later through higher property taxes, higher sales taxes, or new fees.
​
The Texas budget makes it clear that the budget is not declining using the Legislative Budget Board’s (LBB) fuzzy math. This is because the LBB is comparing spending to appropriations while there is no actual spending in the upcoming periods yet so the measurements aren’t consistent. Here are the results with consistent comparisons.

• Since 2022–23, total state funds appropriations jumped from $166.3 billion to $236.5 billion, a rise of about $70.2 billion, or 42.2%.
• Over the same period, all funds grew from $264.8 billion to $338.5 billion, up about $73.7 billion, or 27.8%.
• Even just since 2024–25, state total rose from $219.4 billion to $236.5 billion, an increase of about $17.0 billion, or 7.8%.
• General Revenue alone increased from $144.3 billion to $149.8 billion, up about $5.6 billion, or 3.9%.

​A simple common-sense benchmark for sustainable budgeting is population growth plus inflation. If government grows faster than the number of people it serves and the cost of providing services, it is getting bigger in real per-person terms. That may be defensible if outcomes are improving, but it is rarely what happens. More often, it becomes the excuse for “we need more revenue,” meaning taxpayers pay now or taxpayers pay later.

That is the broader lesson from the shutdown episode. Republicans and Democrats can argue over line items, immigration riders, and which agency gets funded for how long. But the pattern remains: big spending packages, temporary patches, more debt, and another deadline.

This must stop. Congress needs fiscal hawks again, not performers. The federal government cannot keep treating budgeting like a recurring hostage situation while debt and interest costs compound. And states that claim to be different cannot keep spending like Washington and expect credibility to hold.

Closing

The shutdown ended. The headlines faded. The debt kept growing.

That is the reality Americans live with, even when Washington pretends everything is fine. If lawmakers want trust, they should stop governing by crisis and start governing by limits.

Restrain spending growth, pass sustainable budgets, and stop pushing the consequences onto the Fed and future taxpayers.

Review Summary

• Congress ended the shutdown with a $1.2 trillion spending package that funds most agencies through September. The House vote was 217–214, and the deal included back pay. DHS funding only runs to February 13, keeping shutdown risk alive for major functions like TSA and FEMA.
• The real crisis is the debt path, not the shutdown drama, with $38 trillion in gross federal debt and huge unfunded liabilities. Texas shows the same challenge at the state level, with state spending growth far outpacing a sustainable population-plus-inflation path.

Originally published at Kansas Policy Institute.

​Kansas does not have a revenue problem. It has a spending discipline problem, and the state has learned this lesson the hard way before.

Governor Laura Kelly’s proposed $10.8 billion state general fund budget for fiscal year 2027 spends roughly $640 million more than projected revenues. That follows last year’s budget, which administration officials acknowledged spent about $700 million more than the state collected, continuing a pattern of structural imbalance rather than restraint.

Originally published at The Houston Chronicle.

Republican primary voters overwhelmingly want less government, lower taxes and more freedom. Yet the Texas state government is no longer operating that way. 

Spending keeps rising, property taxes remain too high, and lawmakers increasingly substitute control for trust. There are no excuses left.

Republicans have held a full trifecta in our state since 2003: Governor, Texas House and Texas Senate. When one party governs for more than two decades, it owns the outcomes. Yet the government keeps expanding, taxes remain burdensome, and Austin continues to crowd out families and markets. That is not drift. It is a choice.

Yes, Texas’ economy has grown. But that’s not because the state government has shown discipline. Much of that growth is simply because people and businesses are fleeing higher-tax, higher-regulation states like California and New York. 

Texas has benefited from other states’ policy failures. That advantage is real, but it is not permanent. States that grow government faster than population plus inflation eventually lose their edge. 

Unfortunately, that’s happening right here in Texas. 

Over the last two budget cycles, Texas collected more than $50 billion in budget surpluses. That should have been a once-in-a-generation opportunity to permanently reduce the tax burden. 

School district maintenance and operations (M&O) property taxes — the largest share of most Texans’ property tax bills — could have been dramatically reduced and locked in. 

Instead, the state increased its budget by 42% in state funds over two budget cycles, double population growth plus inflation.

Taxpayers were overcharged. The government grew. Relief fell short.

That is not conservative governance. It is a failure of priorities.

So what should Republican primary voters ask before choosing candidates for the Legislature, courts and statewide offices? 
​
Not who sounds toughest. Not who promises another carve-out. But who actually believes the government has grown too large — and knows how to shrink it.

Here are five questions GOP voters should demand clear answers to.

1. Do you believe the Texas government is too big — and what would you cut? 
Talking about “efficiency” is easy. Naming programs to cut is hard. Any serious candidate should be able to identify agencies, subsidies or mandates that have grown too fast and should be reduced or eliminated. If the answer is “nothing,” that tells voters everything they need to know.

2. Why weren’t surpluses used to permanently lower school property taxes? 
With tens of billions in surplus revenue, Texas could have locked in far deeper reductions in school M&O property taxes. Voters should ask why that didn’t happen — and whether candidates support using future surpluses to permanently reduce taxes at the state and local levels rather than expand government.

3. Who decides — parents or politicians?
This may be the most important question of all.

Recent legislative actions — banning cell phones in schools, imposing age verification for social media (which has been blocked in the courts) and expanding state control over family decisions — send a clear signal: Lawmakers increasingly do not trust parents. Conservatives should be honest about that.

Strong institutions begin with strong families, not top-down mandates. When the state replaces parental judgment with political judgment, it weakens the very institutions it claims to protect. Republican voters should demand candidates who trust parents more than bureaucrats.

4. Do you support truly universal school choice — or government-selected winners and losers?
The school choice program passed last year was not universal. It only covers a limited number of families and only applies to certain schools. Real reform empowers every family, not just those approved by policymakers. Candidates should be forced to say plainly whether they support universal choice or managed choice.

5. How will you empower patients and prepare Texas for less federal money?
Healthcare spending keeps growing while access and outcomes disappoint. More government control has not fixed that problem. Texas needs a shift toward empowering patients — more patient choice, fewer mandates and stronger doctor-patient relationships.

Just as important, federal healthcare dollars are not guaranteed. Washington’s debt and deficits mean that states will likely face reduced federal support. Republican voters should ask candidates whether they are preparing Texas for that reality — or simply building a system that depends  money that may not be there tomorrow.

Texas remains strong because of its people, its culture and its institutions, not because of Austin’s budget growth. Stronger institutions come from less government, clearer accountability and trust in families, patients and communities.

After more than two decades of one-party control, Republican voters should demand more than slogans. They should demand answers.

And they should vote accordingly.

Originally published on Substack. 

If the economy feels harder to navigate—even after tax cuts, deregulation, and promises of growth—there’s a reason. I’ve seen it before, up close, from inside the White House.
​
This isn’t hindsight punditry. I lived it. Not sure how or why it happened, but God.

I served at the Office of Management and Budget from June 2019 through May 2020, at the pleasure of President Donald Trump as a political appointee as associate director for economic policy (“chief economist”).

I worked on what became the president’s final budget, which included $4.6 trillion in proposed savings over a decade—documented in the OMB Budget Historical Tables and scored against Congressional Budget Office baselines.
And even that wasn’t enough.

I’m writing this now because the second Trump administration reflects a deeper shift—away from pro-growth reform and toward national conservatism using progressive tools. If this continues, it will make life harder for millions of Americans, regardless of intent.

My goal here isn’t to attack; it’s to share lessons learned, warn about concerns, and offer a better path forward.

​What I Supported—and What I Warned About

Inside the administration, I strongly supported policies that genuinely helped people prosper:

• Tax relief and marginal rate reductions, especially the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which improved incentives for work, saving, and investment
• Deregulation, particularly in energy, finance, and labor markets, with compliance-cost reductions
• Pro-growth reforms that trusted people and markets—not Washington—to allocate resources

But I consistently raised concerns—internally—about three areas:

• Trade protectionism, which I warned would raise relative prices and distort supply chains—later confirmed by research
• Immigration restrictions, which reduce labor supply and long-run growth, as documented later
• Overspending, which I argued would eventually overwhelm much of the benefits of tax cuts and deregulation, which it did

At OMB, many of us pushed hard for spending restraint. The uncomfortable truth is that spending discipline was not a top priority for the president or many agency heads. Not then. And judging by today’s policies, definitely not now.

Internally, the warning was clear—and it bears repeating today: excessive spending and trade protectionism would undo the gains from tax cuts and deregulation.

When COVID Hit, Government Power Took Over

When COVID escalated in early 2020, I was often working with our senior leadership team at OMB and other executive personnel to devise ways to get government out of the way, not expand it—through regulatory relief, waivers, and flexibility consistent with OMB emergency guidance.

I also sat—more than once—in the White House’s Situation Room with economic teams to discuss how people (the economy) would respond to different policy paths.

I was vehemently opposed to lockdowns.

I warned senior leadership and others intensely that the policies being pushed by Dr. Anthony Fauci and others would:

• Break market coordination (supported by analyses on mobility restrictions and economic activity)
• Destroy small businesses (shown in data)
• Centralize power (massive expansion in spending by Congress and Fed)
• Cause long-run damage far worse than acknowledged (education loss, lockdown-related deaths, etc.)

Ultimately, whether President Trump agreed or not, he went along with lockdowns. That decision became one of the largest government failures in modern history—economically, socially, and institutionally.

Lockdowns didn’t just pause the economy. They rewired the relationship between government and markets, normalizing trillions in new spending, debt monetization by the Federal Reserve, and executive control over daily life.
Nearly every affordability crisis we face today traces back to then.

Why I’m More Concerned Today

Back then, there were still people inside the administration pushing back—arguing for restraint, markets, and limits on government power.

Today, I’m not sure that’s true.
​
It increasingly looks like national conservatives (“natcons”) have captured the MAGA policy agenda and are comfortable with:

• Government picking winners and losers through subsidies and mandates
• Price controls and caps on interest rates for credit cards
• Protectionism as an erratic policy with high tariff rates

• Industrial policy and subsidies for purchase of a share of Intel, use of $200 billion to purchase mortgage backed securities, Trump accounts, Trump RX, and more
• Carveouts and exemptions instead of pro-growth tax policy

That’s not conservatism.

It’s not libertarianism.

And it’s not free-market capitalism.
​
Functionally, it’s progressivism with different branding—and it erodes the institutional framework that made American prosperity possible.

Spending is the Problem: Economic Chain Reaction Too Few People See

Here are the steps for how spending seems benign but it is a malignant cancer metastasizing throughout our lives and livelihoods:

1. Overspending leads to deficits.
2. Deficits add to debt.
3. Debt pushes interest rates higher.
4. Higher rates attract foreign capital, strengthening the dollar.
5. A stronger dollar widens trade deficits (not an issue but some hate it), which politicians then “fix” with tariffs.
6. Higher rates pressure the Fed to buy Treasury debt.
7. Debt monetization fuels inflation, distorting the orders of production while reducing real wages and increasing inequality and poverty.

​This isn’t ideology. It’s arithmetic. And it’s happening now.

What Should Be Done Instead

The hopeful part is that none of this is irreversible.
​
That’s why my work has focused on sustainable budgeting with groups like Americans for Tax Reform, the Club for Growth Foundation, and others. You can see that framework here:

• Let Americans Prosper Project: Ensuring Fiscal Sustainability for America’s Future
• Responsible State Budgets Across the U.S.

States that limit spending growth to population growth plus inflation often run surpluses, cut taxes sustainably, and avoid debt spirals.

Washington should finally learn from them.
​
A real pro-growth agenda would:

• Spend less—now, not later (yes, cutting government spend is pro-growth!)
• End trade protectionism (end tariffs and have the focus on what we can control regarding policies at home instead of trying to change policies abroad)
• Reject price controls (say no to credit card interest rate caps, no to MFN drug pricing, and more)
• Stop picking winners and losers (don’t take shares of private businesses, don’t give $1,000 of taxpayer money to parents with newborns, don’t remove specific things like tips, overtime SS income, interest on car loans from the tax code but instead lower and flatten the income tax rates)

• Unleash supply in housing, energy, healthcare, and capital markets (end Dodd-Frank , CFPB and Section 1033 rule, empower patients, and remove incentives in demand and supply side of housing and other markets)
• Let people in markets work!

A Final, Personal Note—and a Small Ask

I’m not writing this to relitigate the past—or to score political points.

I’m writing it because I’ve seen how quickly good intentions turn into bad outcomes when government power replaces market institutions. I’ve also seen how powerful growth can be when policymakers trust people, markets, and sound rules.

The Trump administration has governed for growth before. It can do so again. But only if it rejects progressive tools—no matter how they’re labeled—and recommits to the institutions that allow people to prosper.
​
As Milton Friedman reminded us, policies should be judged by results, not intentions.

Originally published at Kansas Policy Institute. 

​The Kansas State government may be collecting more money than expected, but that should make lawmakers nervous, not comfortable. 

Individual income tax collections are surging, but at the same time retail sales are slowing and corporate income tax revenues are weakening. When workers get paid more while consumers and businesses pull back, the economy is sending a warning.

This tax revenue surge is not the result of strong economic growth. It is largely the product of inflation pushing nominal wages higher and forcing Kansans into higher tax payments even as their real purchasing power falls. 

Meanwhile, households are cutting back and businesses are earning less. That combination matters because it shows where the cost of government is landing. It is landing on workers and families, not on expanding production or investment.

Basic economics explains why this is unsustainable. Durable tax revenue growth comes from rising productivity, business investment, and real income gains. Revenue growth driven by inflation and wage pressure is temporary. 

When consumption slows and profits shrink, the tax base eventually follows. Kansas is already seeing early signs of that shift.

Despite these signals, state spending continues to grow as if revenue strength will last forever. 

The 2025 Kansas Policy Institute Green Book shows Kansas state government spending per resident has climbed to $5,428, ranking 23rd nationally. State and local tax collections per person reached $6,326, ranking 24th. That places Kansas among the higher tax states in the region without the population growth or economic performance to support it.

Strong revenues should prompt restraint. Instead, Kansas relies on tax revenue triggers–whereby if revenues increase to a certain level then tax rates are automatically lowered–to claim discipline. Triggers do not control spending. Even after collecting hundreds of millions of dollars more than expected, Kansans received no meaningful tax relief because an arbitrary threshold was narrowly missed. Meanwhile, government spending kept climbing.

This is why Kansas still faces projected deficits later this decade. The problem is not tax relief. It is spending growth that consistently exceeds population growth plus inflation. When the government expands faster than the private economy, fiscal stress is unavoidable.

The Responsible Kansas Budget was created to stop this pattern. Its principle is simple. Government should not grow faster than what the average taxpayer can afford. Limiting spending growth to less than population growth plus inflation aligns the government with household budgets and economic reality.

But applying a spending cap to an already inflated budget is not enough. Kansas must first confront the size of government it has built. Locking in excess spending guarantees future shortfalls. Fiscal responsibility requires reducing unnecessary spending now, then enforcing a firm growth limit going forward. Some of this was driven by COVID era spending but much of it also because legislators and governors simply cannot help themselves to always spend more. 

This approach also restores accountability. When lawmakers operate within a real constraint, priorities matter. Programs cannot grow automatically. Tradeoffs must be justified. Waste becomes harder to defend.

As the 2026 session approaches, pressure will mount to spend what appears to be surplus revenue or delay reform until later. That would repeat the same mistake Kansas has made before. 

Revenue growth driven by inflation is fragile. If retail sales remain weak and business investment continues to soften, income tax collections will not hold up.

Without spending restraint, the next downturn will again lead to budget gaps and calls for higher taxes or service cuts.
Kansas does not need new budget gimmicks. It needs to apply basic economics consistently. Prosperity comes from private sector growth, not government expansion. Strong revenues should be used to slow spending growth, not accelerate it.

 A Responsible Kansas Budget provides a clear framework to do exactly that. The numbers are already clear. The only question is whether lawmakers act before the cycle repeats.

Originally published at The Pelican Institute.

​Federal spending is out of control. Washington is racking up debt faster than at any time outside a world war or national emergency, and the consequences aren’t theoretical. They’re hitting state and local governments hard, especially in Louisiana.

The national debt just blew past $38 trillion. This year’s deficit alone will be about $2 trillion, fueled not by declining revenues (they’re up!) but by a refusal to curb spending. And that spending spree is already showing up in Louisiana’s economy.

Louisiana’s Labor Market Shows a Slowing Recovery

The latest job numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics reveal that Louisiana added just 19,100 nonfarm jobs over the past year, a 1.0% increase as of August 2025 (latest BLS data available). That might sound encouraging in isolation, but zoom out, and it becomes a red flag.

Many neighboring states are growing faster. In a region where competitive tax structures and stronger labor markets are drawing people and capital, Louisiana risks getting left behind. A 1.0% job growth rate won’t be enough to reverse declining population trends, expand the tax base, or lift incomes. And here’s where it all ties back to Washington: Federal fiscal recklessness is magnifying Louisiana’s economic vulnerability.

Runaway Federal Spending = Higher Costs, Lower Growth

As the federal government borrows trillions of dollars to cover unsustainable spending, interest rates rise. That makes it more expensive for states and local governments to borrow for infrastructure, schools, and basic services. It drives up costs on mortgages, car loans, and business financing, squeezing Louisiana families and small businesses already facing affordability challenges.

And federal uncertainty breeds local instability. When D.C. starts trimming transfers, grants, or matching funds to rein in deficits, states like Louisiana, which rely heavily on federal support, will feel the crunch first. Whether it’s Medicaid, disaster aid, or education funding, when federal budgets tighten, fragile state budgets get stretched. It’s a perfect storm: Washington overspends, interest rates climb, uncertainty spreads—and Louisiana’s already-sluggish growth stalls further.

The Fire Is Spreading. Baton Rouge Can’t Just Watch.

The implications for Louisiana’s state and local policymakers are clear: don’t wait for D.C. to collapse before acting.

• Cap state spending growth to less than population growth plus inflation. That’s what responsible budgeting looks like, especially when federal instability is looming. 
• Advance pro-growth tax reform. Phase out the income tax. Simplify the tax code. Don’t let Louisiana become even less competitive as other states move ahead. 
• Strengthen local fiscal discipline. Cities and parishes must resist debt-driven budgets and prioritize performance, transparency, and responsible budgeting. 
• Shield the state from federal volatility. Don’t tie Louisiana’s future to Washington’s broken promises; reduce dependency on federal funds.

Congress Must Hear from Louisiana’s Leaders

Louisiana’s congressional delegation has an obligation to act before the fiscal cliff hits. The next budget deal, continuing resolution, or debt ceiling negotiation must include real spending cuts and growth limits—not just political posturing. That means rejecting gimmicks and demanding structural reform. Because the longer Congress delays, the greater the risk that Louisiana becomes collateral damage.

Bottom Line: This Is a Warning

The federal budget isn’t just some distant fight in Washington—it’s a ticking time bomb for states like Louisiana. The combination of slow job growth, rising costs, and economic uncertainty makes Louisiana especially exposed to the consequences of fiscal failure. The job numbers prove it: Louisiana isn’t growing fast enough to absorb the shock. Without immediate policy action—both at the state and federal level—the future looks bleak. The fire is burning. It’s time to break the glass and pull the brake before Louisiana gets scorched.