First Person

My Family Fled to the U.S. to Survive. We Deserve to Stay.

| Cesar Linares Estevez
AP Photo/Seth Wenig

I grew up in Los Angeles and Seattle, but my siblings used to warn me not to reveal that we were from Mexico. They were afraid that we would be persecuted, deported, and separated from one another, so they made sure I knew about the possible repercussions of being undocumented. But that doesn’t mean I fully understood it—I couldn’t really comprehend the extent to which it would impact our lives practically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.

I learned what it meant, piece by piece. It meant that my uncle couldn’t volunteer as a chaperone for an elementary school field trip, because a routine background check might give Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) information it could use to deport him. It meant that when my fifth-grade teacher taught us about Social Security, I learned that our family didn’t have it. It meant introducing myself as “Caesar” rather than “Cesar,” and telling people I was born in Los Angeles. It meant working for a construction company that used my immigration status as leverage to pay me less, and demand that I work more.

One experience after another reminded me that our family could not expect safety or support in this country. We were not citizens, so we had no rights.

Nevertheless, my mother took it upon herself to ensure that we had what we needed. She’d work long hours cleaning houses, and sought out any resources she could find to provide us with school supplies, health services, and food. She could not always show physical love, because she was often absent, living out her love through the sacrifices that she made for us.

*          *          *

Like hundreds of thousands of other undocumented mothers, my mother came to the United States from Mexico in search of a better life for herself and her children. She didn’t come to this country to engage in sabotage, terrorism, or criminal activities. She was running from domestic violence, finally fed up with false promises of change. To survive, she left behind everything that she had ever known.

To survive, she left behind everything that she had ever known.

My mother had hope and resilience, stemming from a faith in God that the way things were could not possibly be the way things were meant to be. It’s what led her to make the dangerous trek into the United States. It’s what kept her going even when she and my brother got separated from me and my sister in a sudden sprint past the alambrado. It’s how she found the strength to swim out of sinking mud near the California border. It’s how she stayed calm when my brother pleaded for her to carry him, when she knew it would make them both drown. It’s how she urged him on, yelling “Tu puedes!” until they both reached the shore.

She walked for seven hours that night, without knowing the dangerous terrain or where they were heading. Eventually they came to a street with a few houses, and my mother picked one to knock on. A tall man answered, and—seeing how muddy and weary they were—he took them inside and gave them refuge for the night. The next morning, he fed them and let my mother use the phone to call my uncle and the coyote. Later that day, they reunited with me and my sister.

Before we could reach Santa Ana to meet up with my uncle, ICE detained our family and sent us back to Tijuana. But my mother tried again, and we finally made it to Santa Ana in 1994.

*          *          *

My mother has expected that I show the same effort and make the same sacrifices that come with seeking a better life. She was not going to let me take a year off between high school and college. I went to Texas Wesleyan University to study criminal justice, despite not knowing how we would pay for it—most scholarships require citizenship, so I was instantly disqualified.

I graduated in 2013, but even with DACA—which helped me work while I was an undergrad—I could not follow my desired career path. I wanted to serve as a police officer for my community—I wanted to be a homicide detective, and perhaps work for the FBI. I was denied all those possibilities. Instead, I worked for a few months in Loss Prevention for a Trader Joe’s warehouse through a temp agency.

At the same time, I was volunteering at the church I attended. Through that work, I realized that there were other ways of serving my community that many institutions in the United States were denying me. I applied to the Boston University School of Theology. I was accepted and received a full-tuition scholarship for the three-year Master of Divinity program. I graduated in May 2017, and now I serve my community in Washington state with the United Methodist Church—the same church that helped me apply for DACA half a decade ago.

*          *          *

The actions and rhetoric of the Trump administration have demonstrated that programs like DACA are not enough. There is no assurance against persecution; only the temporary illusion of safety with minimal benefits for our families and our communities.

We are more than currency. We are human beings.

In the wake of Trump’s decision to end DACA, some legislators have reintroduced the DREAM Act, which would provide a pathway to citizenship for people like me who came to this country as children. Legislation like this must be passed if the United States wishes to fight for freedom, liberty, and justice for all. There are already plentiful economic benefits for the United States—we pay taxes and boost profits, and private businesses still find ways to exploit undocumented workers for their benefit.

But we are more than currency. We are human beings. Even the DREAM Act promises too little for too small a group. It excludes people like my mother and uncle because arbitrary and racist laws have made immigration an illegal act. We must do more.

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Interview

Net Neutrality Is the Free Speech Fight of Our Generation

| Rebecca Vallas
AP Photo/Matt Rourke

Last week, the Trump administration’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) released a plan to effectively end net neutrality. To help unpack what this means for regular people who use the internet, I spoke with Katrina vanden Heuvel, the editor and publisher of The Nation.

Rebecca Vallas: So just to kick us off, net neutrality is one of those wonky terms that doesn’t even sound like English. Help us understand—what is net neutrality?

Katrina Vanden Heuvel: I think this fight around net neutrality is the free speech fight of our generation. Net neutrality is essentially the principal that all internet traffic should be treated equally. It prevents internet service providers from charging a premium for access to internet “fast lanes” or slamming the breaks on content that poses a threat to their financial or political interests.

I like the expression “the open internet,” the internet democracy. Net neutrality keeps the internet open, free, and fair; it preserves a level playing field where good ideas can prosper no matter who or where they come from. The free, democratic internet plays an essential role in our civic dialogue. And that’s why the FCC in 2015 passed rules to protect net neutrality, reclassify the internet as a public utility, and enforce the rules of a level playing field. The Trump FCC is trying to eliminate even the most basic net neutrality protections that were put in place. These would include the ban on blocking, replacing them with a “transparency” regime enforced by the FCC. Transparency is a euphemism for doing nothing. A broadband carrier like AT&T, if it wanted, might even practice internet censorship akin to that of the Chinese state, blocking its critics and promoting its own agenda. Allowing such censorship is anathema to the internet’s and America’s founding spirit.

A free internet can amplify those who don’t have the money or power in our unequal society

There are some legal scholars who believe that by going this far in trying to overturn rules put in place under the Obama administration, the FCC may have overplayed its legal hand, and that this will go to the courts because government agencies aren’t free to abruptly reverse long-standing rules on which many have relied without a good reason. A mere change in FCC ideology isn’t enough. And I think we can talk a little bit about the activism that we’re going to see because the future of the internet is at stake on December 14, when former Verizon attorney Ajit Pai, chosen by Trump to chair the FCC, is going to force a vote on ending net neutrality.

RV: The main focus in the media since the announcement from the FCC last week has largely been on the battle between the so-called telecom titans, Comcast and AT&T, Verizon, and the internet giants, Google, Amazon, Facebook. But as you’re describing, there’s a lot more at play than who is going to win a big corporate tug of war—this is going to have real consequences for regular people who use the internet.

KVH: There is a corporatism at work here—the media monopolists in the telecom industry hate net neutrality. They’ve worked for years to overturn guarantees of an open internet because it gets in the way of profits. Now, if net neutrality is eliminated, these media monopolists will restructure how the internet works, creating information super-highways for corporate and political elites and digital dirt roads for those who can’t afford the corporate tolls. It’s fair to say that you’re witnessing a regime change where if Pai at the FCC is successful, he’s going to hand the keys to our open internet to major corporations to charge more for this tiered system. So it will, along with the tax bill—which will make our lives more unequal, more dirty, more unhealthy—you may well see a tiered system where powerful websites can pay to have their content delivered faster to consumers.

There’s another argument that’s been thrown out there, which is that the FCC chair says that he’s trying to make sure that new investment goes into the internet. He’s claiming that industry investments have gone down since 2015, the year the Obama administration last strengthened the net neutrality rules. Wrong, it’s just not the case. But let me step back and just ask, why should industry investments be the dominant measure of success in internet policy? Why is that the measure? What about improved access for students, or the emergence of innovations like streaming TV? So I think there’s a lot of skewing, a lot of false information being thrown around as the FCC tries to steamroll through changes that will impact and harm consumers, people with less access to capital, students, independent media, alternative voices, so there’s a real First Amendment free speech issue here, too.

RV: Some, including W. Kamau Bell, have pointed out that the end of net neutrality could be particularly devastating for artists and activists by effectively silencing the voices of people who aren’t already established or backed by those with power. He points out in an op-ed in The New York Times, “This fair internet, where everyone from an amateur comedian to a celebrity to a huge media company plays by the same rules, means you don’t need a lot of money or the backing of someone with power to share your content with the world.” And he names the example of Issa Rae, who started the web series “The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl,” which started as a YouTube series in 2011 but has now actually become a show, “Insecure,” that’s got its third season happening on HBO. It’s hard to imagine that happening in a world that doesn’t have net neutrality.

KVH: What we’re witnessing is more than a regulatory shift. It’s more than a story that should be consigned to the business pages. This is about a societal change. And if the FCC allows this digital profiteering to define the internet, it will affect all of what you spoke of, it will affect personal communications, education, commerce, economic arrangement, our politics and democracy itself. And it is a civil rights issue in a fundamental way because it’s about whose voice is heard. The most vulnerable are usually those who have a harder time making their voices heard, and a free internet lifts up and can amplify those who don’t have the money or power in our unequal society.

What we’re witnessing is more than a regulatory shift

So this is a real fight for the kind of society we want to be, and I think that needs to be understood as we move to oppose not just the net neutrality decision. The FCC is beginning to overturn efforts to close the digital divide between wealthy and poor Americans, they’re declaring war on consumers, and in what I think is one of the most callous steps, the FCC abandoned an effort to limit the exorbitant cost of prison phone calls that sometimes force inmates’ families to pay upward of a dollar a minute to speak to their loved ones. So there is a real rollback of humanism as corporatism ascends.

This is a fire sale for humongous corporate interests, for the monopolists of the telecom world.  There are going to be protests December 7 in advance of the December 14 FCC vote targeting the offices of corporations that have opposed net neutrality such as Verizon. There are going to be protests against offices of members of Congress who have opposed net neutrality. There will be marches on the FCC both digitally and on the streets, and there are legal and legislative strategies to defend the internet and the future.

RV: The politics on this as well are somewhat baffling, because obviously this is part of a larger deregulation agenda. But it also just seems a little bit odd frankly, coming from an administration that has taken the exact opposite position on other issues related to competition. I’m thinking here specifically about the Time Warner-AT&T merger. It was literally just one day before the FCC announcement on net neutrality that the Trump justice department announced its opposition to the proposed merger.

KVH: It’s incoherent. The reality is if you’re a strong supporter of free markets, net neutrality is what allows for competition and free market in the broadband space. If you’re someone who strongly supports free speech and freedom of expression, net neutrality is what prevents companies like Comcast that own NBC from prioritizing or censoring content online. I think there is a split in the progressive community about the Trump administration’s move on the merger.

What is chilling, however, is a personal vendetta against CNN. It looks like what we’ve seen too often from this administration, a politicization of the tools of justice, privatization of justice for the sake of an administration. So there is an incoherence that is puzzling, but what is not puzzling is that the dismantling of the administrative state, the march through the institutions, the deregulatory crusade is in full throttle. And what we’re witnessing with the FCC is in sync with that. In that sense there is a coherence to this deregulation of all kinds of reforms that have brought us clean air, clean water, and a free and democratic internet.

This interview was conducted for Off-Kilter and aired as part of a complete episode on December 1. It was edited for length and clarity.

 

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Feature

Why Have Banks Stopped Lending to Low-Income Americans?

| Amanda Abrams
AP Photo/Seth Wenig

At the end of September, the Federal Reserve released its annual collection of data gathered under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act. Among other findings, the report details that the country’s three largest banks—Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and JPMorgan Chase—have sharply cut back on lending to low-income people over the past few years. The three banks’ mortgages to low-income borrowers declined from 32 percent in 2010 to 15 percent in 2016.

The report also shows that in 2016, black and Hispanic borrowers had more difficulty acquiring home loans than whites. And it revealed that last year, for the first time since the 1990s, most mortgages didn’t come from banks; they came from other institutions—often less-regulated online entitites like Loan Depot or Quicken Loans. These companies, technically known as nonbank financial institutions, can be more flexible than traditional banks, but may also charge higher rates and fees.

Martin Eakes and other employees of Self-Help, the innovative North Carolina-based credit union, must be wondering if they’ve stepped back in time.

Eakes, who founded Self-Help, has spent the past few decades working to expand credit, particularly conventional mortgages, to low-income borrowers, and to publicize and eliminate hazards that could wipe out a poor family’s wealth. He and his staff recognized early on the key role that homeownership could play in allowing low-income families to move into the middle class. Those efforts are chronicled in Lending Power, a new book by Howard Covington that illustrates the organization’s rise and longtime efforts to help low-income people buy homes and establish small businesses.

In the 1980s, when Self-Help was finding its footing, the financial world had several major blind spots when it came to lending to low-income people. Above all, most banks considered low-income families, especially families of color, to be credit risks, rarely providing them with mortgages at conventional rates.

In less than a decade, Self-Help helped turned that truism on its head.

“There’d been a real struggle to figure out how to expand homeownership into that segment at the margin of sustainable credit in a way that works,” explains Jim Parrott, a fellow at the Urban Institute.

Self-Help enlisted the help of foundations and big banks to build capital, and provided individualized lending that looked beyond borrowers’ credit reports—examining instead their ability to consistently pay their rent, for example. The organization also created a reserve fund to help borrowers struggling to meet payments.

Thanks in part to Self-Help’s efforts, lending to low- and moderate-income people (LMI, in industry-speak) began to gain traction in the late 1990s. But during the housing boom of the early 2000s, low-income borrowers faced increasing threats from predatory lenders. These lenders often saddled responsible borrowers who could have qualified for conventional loans with expensive fees and add-ons—things like increased points, balloon mortgages with payments that swelled over time, and pre-payment penalties. In many cases, the loans were particularly targeted to black families. Black Americans earning annual salaries of $100,000 were more likely to receive subprime loans than whites making $30,000. Many of those folks wound up in foreclosure during the recession due to the untenable terms of their loans.

Self-Help had uncovered some of these predatory lending practices a decade earlier, eventually helping to pass groundbreaking anti-predatory legislation in North Carolina. And the organization’s spinoff group, the Center for Responsible Lending, had a major hand in arming the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which protects consumers from predatory mortgages and debt traps. [Editor’s note: Read more about the latest threats to the CFPB here].

Now that this type of predatory lending has been mostly snuffed out, advocates are dealing with another problem: Credit to low-income communities has dried up since the foreclosure epidemic. Lending standards have become significantly more stringent, with many lenders unwilling to take a risk on low-income families. “We’ve seen no significant recovery of lending to LMI neighborhoods,” explains Jason Richardson, director of research and evaluation at the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, citing the recently-released Federal Reserve data.

African American homeownership is at its lowest level in more than 40 years

Banks that receive deposits from low-income neighborhoods have an obligation to make loans to those same communities. But now, it’s unclear whether the Trump administration’s regulators are adequately enforcing this. Over 98 percent of banks are currently given passing grades by regulators, and in October, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency revised its regulations to further limit the number of downgrades banks receive.

“We absolutely feel there should be more examination of what the banks are doing,” says Richardson.

Until then, however, low-income and minority families are practically back where they started. African American homeownership is at its lowest level in more than 40 years, and the gap between black and white homeowners is the largest since World War II.

Meanwhile, although much lending to low-income people has disappeared, Self-Help is continuing to issue mortgages to poor families in its network. And Parrott, at the Urban Institute, thinks the organization might still have something to teach other lenders.

“To me, the question is whether or not the lessons that Self-Help is learning are scalable and transferable into the market”—in a sustainable way, Parrott says. “Because if they are, Self-Help is a wonderful resource because it’ll help us figure out how to better serve a segment of the population that could be homeowners.”

Translation: Despite a decade of setbacks, the game is definitely not over for low-income borrowers.

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Explainer

A New Bill in Congress Would Make Mobile Home Loans Even More Predatory

| Sarah Edelman & Michela Zonta
AP Photo/Jae C. Hong

Tomorrow, the House of Representatives will vote on a bill that would allow employees at manufactured home retailers—who sell houses often called “mobile homes” or “trailers”—to steer customers towards specific loan choices. The Senate Banking Committee will vote on a similar proposal on December 5.

It’s a wonky bill, and it’s flown under the radar so far. But—particularly given the political war being waged at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—it shouldn’t get buried. More than 1 in 10 homes in rural or small-town America were built in a factory, and they are usually owned by older, poorer Americans. Even though the average sale price for a new manufactured home is $68,000, consumers who take out a loan to buy one typically pay high interest rates and fees that can add hundreds of dollars to their monthly housing payment.

Proponents of the new legislation argue that this change will allow salespeople to help consumers find financing more quickly. However, it also creates a powerful incentive for retailers to drive consumers toward the loans that are most profitable for the business—even when there are less expensive options available for the consumer.

Carla Burr, who owns her home in Chantilly, Virginia, was surprised by the interest rate she was offered after she sold her condominium to purchase a manufactured home in 2004. She had good credit and could make a sizeable down payment—she had just netted more than $100,000 from the sale of her condo. But lenders were asking her to pay an interest rate greater than 10 percent for a 20-year mortgage, more than double what she paid on the mortgage for her previous home. “It’s as if they are treating manufactured homeowners as if we were substandard, or uneducated,” Burr said. Today, even though mortgage interest rates are generally lower than they were 13 years ago, manufactured housing consumers like Burr are still being charged high rates.

About 70 percent of mortgages for manufactured homes are already higher-priced mortgage loans Higher-priced mortgage loans have interest rates and fees (APR) above the standard rate (APOR) by 1.5 or more percentage points.
, compared with only 3 percent of mortgages for site-built homes. That’s due, at least in part, to the lack of competition within the manufactured housing industry. Companies affiliated with a single large corporation, Clayton Homes, were responsible for 38 percent of manufactured housing loans in 2016 and for more than 70 percent of loans made to African American buyers in 2014. That leaves companies with little need to lower their rates to attract consumers—and that would be especially true if there was a steady stream of referrals from affiliated retail shops.

Lenders were asking her to pay more than double the interest rate she paid on her previous home

Clayton Homes is also the largest producer of manufactured homes and sells these homes through 1,600 retailers. That gives the company thousands of opportunities to solicit customers for loans offered by its mortgage lending affiliates, 21st Mortgage and Vanderbilt Mortgage, which make far more loans each year than any other lenders. They also charge consumers higher interest rates than much of their competition.

In Virginia, for instance, this company’s interest rates for higher-priced loans averaged 6.1 percentage points above a typical mortgage loan, whereas interest rates charged for similar loans by the rest of the industry in the commonwealth averaged 3.9 percentage points above a typical loan. For a Virginian taking out an average-size loan from a lender affiliated with Clayton Homes, this means they could pay about $75 more each month and about $18,000 more over the life of a 20-year loan than if they had gotten a mortgage elsewhere. Since owners of manufactured homes in Virginia earn about $40,000 each year—about half the annual income of other homeowners in the commonwealth—these additional payments can be a significant financial strain.

Interest rates aren’t the only thing on the line. The House bill under consideration would also allow lenders to include higher up-front fees, prepayment penalties, balloon payments, and hefty late fees on higher-interest loans, leaving many manufactured housing buyers with expensive loans that are difficult to pay off. Manufactured housing industry lobbyists claim that regulations preventing these practices have made it more expensive to do business and, as a result, consumers can’t get loans to buy manufactured homes. However, Center for American Progress analysis shows that 2015 loan volumes were fairly similar to the volumes before the regulation went into effect; the biggest difference is that fewer consumers received loans with exorbitant rates and risky terms. Last year, there was a modest 5 percent decrease in the number of loans originated, but lending quality remained stronger.

If Congress is serious about giving consumers more borrowing choices, more high-quality lenders need to offer mortgage loans for manufactured housing. However, by giving further advantage to today’s largest providers, these bills could derail efforts to expand financing options available for consumers. Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and state housing finance agencies are taking steps to make it easier for lenders to offer mortgages for manufactured homes. For instance, both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have committed to buying more manufactured housing loans from banks, which should encourage more lending. They are also launching pilots to buy manufactured housing loans titled as chattel, which represent the majority of manufactured housing lending. Allowing the largest manufactured housing companies today to tighten their grip on consumers could put newer lenders, who do not have salespeople at retailers promoting their offerings, at a disadvantage.

Consumers of manufactured housing deserve the same rights and protections available to those buying site-built homes. And since families that live in manufactured housing are more likely to be teetering on the edge of financial stability, they are the least well-positioned to shoulder additional burdens. Congress should take further steps to expand options for these consumers, not pave the way for more abuses.

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Interview

This Republican State Senator is Trying to Clean Up the Failed Kansas Tax Experiment

| Jeremy Slevin & Zahra Mion
Flickr/Jimmy Emerson

We all know the story by now. In 2012, with Republican Gov. Sam Brownback at the helm, Kansas enacted massive state-wide tax cuts. Proponents of supply-side economics insisted that these tax cuts would not only pay for themselves, but would also spur massive economic growth in the state. Brownback said the tax cuts would be “a shot of adrenaline into the heart of the Kansas economy.” He promised that they’d boost investment and increase employment; and he swore they’d “directly benefit our schools and local governments.”

Instead, over the next few years, the tax cuts wrought havoc on the state’s economy and funding for schools, health care, and other priorities. The state’s economy slowed down, their credit rating was reduced, and job creation underperformed nearly every neighboring state as well as the national average. Now, Despite Governor Brownback’s failed “real-life experiment” and dire warnings from Kansas legislators, Congressional Republicans are planning to apply an eerily similar proposal nationwide.

Jeremy spoke with Kansas State Sen. Dinah Sykes, a lifelong Republican who successfully ran for the Kansas Senate on a platform of repealing Gov. Brownback’s tax cuts after seeing what happened to her kids’ public schools.

Jeremy Slevin: So, you are a Republican—you voted for Sam Brownback when he first ran for governor, but you ended up running for your seat on a slightly different platform. Do you want to talk about how you got involved in running for office?

Sen. Dinah Sykes: I was involved in my children’s school as PTA president, and I started seeing the PTA foot the bill for a lot of things. Helping more with field trips, buying books for the library, and things like that. The classes were getting larger so it made me start asking more questions—going to school board meetings, talking to my representative. I realized that it was more of a state issue with the way that the funds were coming in, so I got involved.

Regardless of whether you agree with someone or not, you should be able to have a dialogue with them.

At the time I lived in a different section of Kansas, and when I moved just a few miles it changed my representative and my senator. I tried to open a dialogue with them as well, but I was not listened to because I had a different opinion from them. Before, I was able to talk to my Republican representative—regardless of whether you agree with someone or not, you should be able to have a dialogue with them. So, I was frustrated trying to figure out what to do next. I didn’t know if I should try to find a good candidate to get behind or start with the school board or what, and doors seemed to open and open and so I finally decided to run for the Senate seat.

JS: And at some point, Gov. Brownback and the legislators passed major tax cuts for businesses and a lot of wealthy folks in the state. How did that play a role in the schools and your decision to run?

DS: In 2012, the tax plan created a loophole for businesses so that if they were an LLC, they were not taxed on pass-through income. We also had three tax brackets and we went down to two.

It did not work. We had nine rounds of budget cuts. Borrowed $2 billion from our highway fund. Now I’m all for bonding that money when it’s building infrastructure, but that’s not what it was used for. It was there to bridge the gap and to try to do a sales tax increase. Meanwhile, class sizes were large and my school had not bought library books for five years. And we were seeing that the core function of government was not able to work properly.

JS: Was it tough to challenge someone in your own party?

DS: Yeah it was challenging, and you’re going against an incumbent that’s sitting on a pot of money. For me, someone who is new to this, I was just making sure I built those relationships with local leaders and my chambers of commerce, and talked to my neighbors. It really was a grassroots thing, trying to get the everyday Kansan more involved.

I think honestly that the everyday Kansan and the everyday American want people to work together. And it’s not, “I have this great idea and everyone needs to come on board with me,” it’s, “How do we work together?” and “I have this point of view and you have a different point of view and how do we come together and compromise?” Compromise has become such a negative word in politics, but that is how good policy is made.

JS: The reason we are talking about this today is that the Trump administration and some Republicans in Congress are considering similar legislation that goes a step further from what Kansas does. What words of wisdom would you give to your colleagues in Washington who are considering this tax bill?

DS: There are differences between the federal plan and Kansas plan. When the Kansas plan was first brought on the Senate floor, the plan had pay-fors in it, and I’m seeing some of that with the federal plan. But my biggest caution is to let the process work properly. Work both sides of the aisle, come together, have the committee sessions where you vet things. Don’t look for just the

dynamic scoring Dynamic scoring analyzes the bugetary impact of major legislation under different possible economic outcomes.

or whatever that’s just going to paint your picture. Look at both sides and have those conversations. At the end of the day, make the hard choice and look at what is really in the best interest of our people.

Compromise has become such a negative word in politics, but that is how good policy is made.

JS: Are you worried that, similarly to how Kansas faced budget cuts following the tax cuts, the same thing could happen at the federal level? I think currently the federal bill costs about $1.5 trillion, not factoring in dynamic scoring as you mentioned.

DS: It is a concern, and I am going to try to stay optimistic and have faith that as more and more people are coming out and wanting to pass good tax reform, that we don’t short-change the process. That we do look at all sides and come up with a good plan.

JS: And going to back to what happened in Kansas, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. We should mention that after you got elected you guys went about repealing some of these tax cuts.

DS: Yes, in the end of our session we did pass a bipartisan bill. That took us back, it got rid of the loophole for LLCs, so businesses are back on the tax roll. It increased income rates for all Kansans and we added back in the third tier on our tax plan. It was painful and a lot of compromise. Like I said, I think that’s when you make good policy: When you work together, both parties. We were writing on a white board, “What are things you want to see?” “How do we establish this?”

And at the end of the day we had to come up with an override because our governor did veto it. But we had conservatives with roles as well as moderates, and we all came together and passed the plan.

JS: And how has that affected the budget cuts? Have you seen a return to funding in the schools or is that going to take some time?

DS: It will take some time. We did put more money in and we are still in litigation with the Supreme Court on our school funding. We were able to give pay raises to state employees who have not received pay raises in 8 to 10 years. We are seeing our revenues increase monthly, but you know it’s caution. And we didn’t get in the hole that we are in overnight and we are not going to get out of it overnight.

JS: Thank you so much, senator, we really appreciate you taking the time. Hopefully, members at the national level can learn some of the lessons from what happened in Kansas.

DS: Alright, thank you.

This interview was conducted for Off-Kilter and aired as part of a complete episode on November 10. It was edited for length and clarity.

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