To the editor:

Regarding the March 25 J-W editorial on misplaced priorities in the Kansas Legislature this session and reducing taxes at all costs:

Having recently moved back to Kansas from South Carolina, I know from personal experience how devastating this myopic perspective can be for our state. South Carolina ranks near the bottom in just about every category one can think of: high school graduation rate, domestic violence, highway fatalities, funding for public education, prison population, job growth – and on and on.

When I moved to South Carolina in 2005, I was surprised upon purchasing a home in the same price range of the one I had owned in Lawrence that my property taxes were less than one-third what they had been in Kansas. It didn’t take long to discover why. During the year and a half I lived there, the constant message from South Carolina citizens was taxes needed to be lower. I also saw firsthand what that kind of tax reduction resulted in: schools that were falling down, over 50 percent dropout rate, school buses that caught fire on a regular basis (with students aboard), few, if any, highway patrolmen on the interstates, social issues ignored.

I’m very happy to be back in my home state of Kansas, and my wonderful hometown of Lawrence. But I’m very worried that the “no tax” and “lower tax” voices will mean a Kansas that looks a lot more like a southern state and a lot less like the wonderful Midwestern state I grew up in.

Patti Butcher,

Lawrence