🎥 OPINION: Democrat rep from Hutch talks the 's-word'

Fears about socialism will take the stage in this year's election

Saturday’s raucous gubernatorial debate at the Kansas State Fair made one thing very clear: This election cycle Kansas Republicans - led by the sometimes conservative, sometimes moderate, sometimes sue-happy Kris Kobach-esque candidate Derek Schmidt - are going to make the election about Joe Biden, inflation, and the oldest and most reliable political boogeyman - Socialism.

And why wouldn’t they? Those Photoshopped sepia-toned images of your friendly neighborhood do-gooder alongside some scary national Democrat has long been an effective tool. It frees Republican candidates of the need to run their own campaigns, show up at public forums, or explain their policy positions. Thanks to the power of graphic design and misinformation, even good and reasonable Republicans have been vanquished by an engineered appearance with the sinister Washington Democrat de jour.

Now I don’t blame them for the inflation bit - it’s a legitimate concern for families in Kansas. But let’s not allow ourselves to believe the lie that inflation is exclusively under the control of one party or another. What we’re experiencing now is the result of global economic realities, breakdowns in supply systems (that were largely built around maximizing profit and less around ensuring a reliable supply of goods), and global monetary policies that artificially restrained natural inflation for a generation.

Way before Covid, and way before both Presidents Trump and Biden infused money into the economy, there were the “Too Big to Fail” handouts that bailed out large investment banks who had been grossly irresponsible and nearly trashed the world economy in 2007-08. Aside from putting taxpayers on the hook for banks and car manufacturers, it also saw the public propping up of the housing market - largely destabilized by irresponsible lending practices and large financial institutions deploying incredibly creative methods to make money from bad loans. And let’s not forget that before that we had the eerily similar Savings & Loan bailout in the 1980s.

So let’s not pretend that throwing a few bones at the working stiff has led to the downfall of our economy - especially when we’ve made a habit of socializing the cost of bad business decisions.

Which brings me to the most curious and interesting of this year’s campaign rhetoric - the big, scary “S” word: Socialism.

When a Republican candidate can’t figure out how to win an election, there’s the ever reliable cry of Socialism and how it’s ruining our country. The threat of Socialism has been an effective political tool since World War I, and only gained in power during the protracted “Cold War” in which anything that looked in the general direction of Russia sent waves of fear across the country.

There was even a movie to tell us how pervasive the threat was to the American way of life.

Is it just me that finds it amusingly weird that there was such a fascination with things being filmed behind locked doors in the 1940s and 50s?

But I wondered why our tax money is being used to clean up a mess that was created by people who made the mess in the first place - and who quite likely made a healthy profit in the process. Just like those people who don’t want their money going to pay off others’ student loans, I don’t really want my money going to plug gas wells that should’ve been paid for by people who hoped to find wealth by poking holes in the ground .

In Kansas, we carve out about $10.7 billion in various tax exemptions and deductions each year. Now, not all of this is decidedly good or bad. Some of that includes things like deductions for families on their income taxes, as well as property tax and sales tax rebates. But some of that includes exemptions and deductions for large corporations. And sometimes that savings helps us get things we want - like better access to utilities, internet, and infrastructure. But sometimes, it’s just a tool for big companies to reduce their tax burdens.

Speaking of tax burdens, did you know that in 1992 residential property accounted for 35 percent of the state’s overall assessed property valuation (property tax base) but that has grown to 54 percent by 2022 - while commercial valuation as a percent of the state’s property tax base has dropped to 24 percent? Or that for every dollar Kansas collects in taxes, 90 cents comes from you in the way of individual income and sales tax, while only 7 cents comes from the corporate income tax?

So, about that big, scary “S” word that will take center stage this election…We do have a Socialism problem, but not in the way we’ve often been told.

I have friends who tell me that between health insurance premiums, copays, and co-insurance, they’re spending upwards of $20,000 a year on health care. I have other friends who won’t change jobs - or are terrified of losing the one they have - because they have had cancer or some other serious health issue and fear losing their health insurance.

I have other friends who work in small businesses that don’t offer insurance, and they’re just out of luck. I have other friends who had to downsize or close their small business because they can’t compete for labor thanks to the prohibitive cost of employer-sponsored health insurance.

Yet your tax money is used every day to prop up some dying business - or to invest in a new venture.

We have industries with enough money to influence the laws that govern them and build tax policy to their liking, while parents are spending upwards of $10,000-$12,000 a year for childcare.

And when people struggle in their personal lives, make some bad choices, aren’t born to the right people, or just aren’t gifted with the right tools to navigate an increasingly complex world, there’s a chorus of those who scream that they should just try harder, and do better, at life.

But throughout our history, both nationally and in Kansas, when the biggest for-profit players need a little help pulling up those bootstraps, when they make mistakes that threaten the world’s wellbeing, or when they’re done making their money and leave a mess behind - we barely hesitate to hit up taxpayers for a collective - one might say socialist - bailout that we later celebrate as good and necessary.

I’m not saying that it’s all bad. We sometimes decide as a nation, state, or community how we’d like to make public investments. In the case of the aforementioned gas well plugging, it’s probably good for all of us to chip in and address a public safety and health nuisance - even if I think it really ought to be someone else’s problem to fix.

Public education, infrastructure, transportation, and scientific research have all come from public, collective investment. And we’ve all benefited from it in one way or another. It’s allowed companies to make more money and grow, while it’s helped the average family to live a more comfortable life filled with more opportunity for growth and prosperity.

It is, however, disingenuous to pretend that one thing is Socialism while the other is not. We can’t label Wall Street bailouts an investment while calling any move to address spiraling healthcare costs for poor and working families a socialist entitlement.

And we sure shouldn’t let politicians who have been party to the giveaways scare us into believing that a vote for them is a vote for good old American capitalism when the record shows they’ve supported their own version of Socialism for a very long time.

State Rep. Jason Probst, D-Hutchinson, represents the 102nd District in the Kansas House of Representatives.