The Kansas City Star has a fever, and the only cure is more anti-tax cut blogs. This time the Star's editorial board takes aim at a proposal that would extend 2014's tax cuts and, among other things, would decrease Missouri's top income tax rate from 5.5% to 5%. The reform package would be a modest but essential update to the tax code. Missouri has been stranded on first base on tax policy for decades now; it's long past time state legislators got the line moving again on economic growth.
What makes the Star's prolific blogging against tax cuts so unseemly is that the newspaper is already a tax cut beneficiary—it's just that their cuts have been made only for them. Notably, the newspaper enjoys a tax abatement at its printing facility—one that should have expired last year. Instead, after playing nice with City Hall, the Star now gets hundreds of thousands of dollars each year in what the paper self-described as "tax relief."
Yes, the editorialists at the Star should feel a twinge of shame every time they bash tax cuts in Kansas City, and attempt to deny tax relief to others.
