By Gary Brunk

Kansas needs an economy that works for everyone, where the road map to opportunity and the middle class is available to all.

That would seem to be a goal for the Brownback administration. Road Map 2.0, unveiled during the governor’s 2014 campaign, says that “All Kansans deserve opportunities for success, the ability to earn a family-sustaining wage and to enjoy a good quality of life.”

And it would seem to be the goal of the “welfare reform” law that the governor signed recently, saying that its primary objective was to get people into “well-paying jobs.”

But there’s the rub: The Kansas economy is not creating enough jobs and many of the jobs being created are not “family-sustaining.”

According to the most recent employment report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, job creation in Kansas lags behind most of our neighboring states. Furthermore, the future employment picture is not so bright. Among the ten occupations that the Kansas Department of Labor projects will have the largest numerical growth by 2022, seven typically require at most a high school education for an entry level position — that is, these are jobs that tend to pay very low wages.

We can do better.

First we need to recognize that unemployment and wage stagnation during the Great Recession dealt a crushing blow to the middle class and that, today, more than five years after the end of the recession, far too many families with employed adults remain poor and struggle to get back on their feet.

Second, we should look back and remember that government supported the creation of the great American middle class in the 1950s and ’60s. It did so by partnering with business, planning for the future, and making investments in education, infrastructure, research and the health of its population.

We can do so again, but to do so we need to have the revenues to support making essential investments — with the caveat that new revenues should not fall disproportionately on low and moderate income families.

Kansas already has one of the most regressive tax system in the country: While the top 1 percent of income earners pay 3.9 percent of their income to state and local taxes, the bottom 20 percent pay more than 10 percent of their income for state and local taxes, largely in sales and excise taxes.

The tax increases proposed by the governor and some in the Legislature would make Kansas taxes even more regressive. To make sure that low- and moderate-income families are not shouldering a disproportionate share of taxes, we should repeal the 2012 income tax cuts.

And then let’s get back to building an economy that works for everyone, an economy where the road map to opportunity and the middle class is available to all.