Michael Austin, KS Economist

08/28/2026

HOW DOES WELFARE MAKE A FATHER LEAVE HIS FAMILY?

Economist Thomas Sowell says that is only half the story. A lot of these homes never had a father in them.

Teenage girls get pregnant with no man in the house. That is not desertion. That is a family that never formed.

08/27/2026

Oh heck no...

08/26/2026

The sales tax proposal died. THE OBLIGATIONS DID NOT.

That is exactly what my analysis warned about.

The debate was never really “tax versus no tax.” Wichita had major obligations to meet either way. The real question was HOW we would pay for them.

Watch Wichita Win proposed lowering the City mill levy by roughly four mills while sharing part of the burden with visitors and commuters through a 1% sales tax. My model therefore estimated the taxes and fees households could face under the status quo as costs that could be “AVOIDED.”

I was heavily criticized for that assumption.

But arithmetic is stubborn.

Wichita is now funding Second Light from reserves and moving forward with roughly $253 million in public-safety capital investment, nearly $246 million through GO at-large financing, whose debt service is primarily supported by property taxes.

Meanwhile, the City mill levy remains at 32.340 mills — instead of falling roughly four mills.

I do not fault Mayor Wu or city leaders. I appreciate them confronting obligations that cannot simply be wished away. That is what governing requires once the campaign signs come down.

And yes, Wichita should cut unnecessary spending. Absolutely. But shouting “cut spending” without identifying the cuts, confronting unavoidable obligations, and building enough support to enact them is not a fiscal strategy. It is a slogan.

My disappointment is that Wichita lost an opportunity for meaningful property tax relief because populist rhetoric made it sound as though saying “no” would make the obligations disappear.

It didn’t.

Eventually, the numbers assert themselves. The tradeoffs come due. And families and businesses pay the bill.

The question is whether we learn from it, or fall for the same argument again.

08/25/2026

6PM TONIGHT 8/25 I'll join the Kansas Federation of Republican Women tonight for their "On The Issues" discussion.

This is an AMA, so bring your questions and hear an honest and fresh perspective on the issues of the day!

REGISTER HERE, https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fus02web.zoom.us%2Fmeeting%2Fregister%2FiagP2nsOT2CFf3b2RmeZmw%3Ffbclid%3DIwcGRvZgVleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETE3SWRmMXJQbllwOGhrdDl3c3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHqzOYDFdAr-FwAkO3vfmbl90_CJ4-ryziH7NAzIF5Qu9AHy4DZx2fCXQXuPD_aem_Lr7r_YAPSbfN1f3trNy_zg%23%2Fregistration&h=AUCPo1rfxoBh8-xDquS-YlnTolwpev9qty3sp1K0hW7ahr0HYOGqVzqWGMG6RUwTJVPmjygACJ57ZYmlP_3rZMR2qdszkrcVxFIWur2Y8yg4zLKRi-GoGSXK0Czyxla-H6RZ5XLuRU4VhD3lldTcaBJog77hAQ&__tn__=-UK-R&c[0]=AUAprTJj5H0hXHm3DcC1Jt2u_nHKRJxvKsKgwLem17GghxYMZr9V6Q4cjdD_mXhfolm2mPwdV2kAYV3KVzW7njwZ2qa24-p1sVrSZsY1SOD7frxL6-qbBPPuiFemQgrTO5DJgD0UfMcAmRqXZBfd1VDv_Yx7AXPPi2rPf8gR0W4TN6nT1WCbyTHjlvn6V0bDsyrADGLzy6hKcsdr0fOddOl6fw

08/24/2026

Once again, economics wins the day.

President Trump deserves credit for taking action to lower beef prices. But there is an important economic lesson buried in this announcement:

The administration is lowering a tariff because it wants lower prices.

That’s not a coincidence. Tariffs are taxes on imports. When domestic supply is already constrained, taxing additional foreign supply puts even more upward pressure on prices. Remove that barrier, increase available supply, and you put downward pressure on prices.

Not even midterm politics can repeal supply and demand.

But there is a broader lesson here for conservatives.

Populism has taken deep root in conservative politics,
and it is creating some real economic contradictions.

We constantly hear that groceries, housing, energy, and everyday life must become more affordable, yet increasingly, politicians posture against the very competition, trade, and additional supply that can help bring prices down.

You cannot demand affordability while opposing every free-market mechanism that produces it.

The danger of populism is that it's untethered from economic principle. It's a policy that eventually becomes whatever sounds popular at the moment.

And if conservatives abandon sound principles in favor of government intervention whenever it benefits our preferred constituency, how are we economically different from the progressives we criticize?

Kudos to President Trump for recognizing that Americans need relief at the grocery store.

Hopefully, this is also a step toward recognizing that lowering the cost of living should have been a priority from Day One, and that protectionism works directly against that goal.

Rebuilding the ground beef herd and LOWERING prices for the American people. 🇺🇸

08/20/2026

LET'S TALK DATA CENTERS.

Credit where credit is due: Ty Masterson’s Data Center Ratepayer Protection Pledge gets several important things right.

Masterson is right to insist that large data centers:

• Pay the costs they impose on the electric grid rather than shifting those costs onto residential and small-business ratepayers.

• Make long-term commitments so Kansans aren't left paying for stranded utility infrastructure if a project leaves.

• Address legitimate water concerns.

• Face appropriate security protections when critical infrastructure is involved.

Those are good, if not GREAT principles.

But I would add an important one: any data center deal should be simple.

Bring your capital. Build your facility. Pay your taxes. Pay your energy and infrastructure costs. Compete on your own.

There are also places where Masterson's proposal could improve in the future.

1. Rather than simply requiring data centers to pay the same electricity "price" as everyone else, Kansas should require "cost causation": large-load customers should pay the generation, transmission, substations, interconnection, and other infrastructure costs their projects actually create. If they can negotiate a lower market rate without shifting costs onto everyone else, that's fine.

2. Kansas should be careful about replacing market decisions with overly prescriptive government mandates on water or energy. Protect property rights, price scarce resources appropriately, and make companies responsible for the costs they impose.

THIS IS ALSO WHERE I STRONGLY DISAGREE WITH CINDY HOLSCHER'S APPROACH.

Despite Holscher calling for no tax breaks for data centers (a good thing), her proposal for a statewide moratorium on new data centers is the WRONG answer.

We don't protect Kansans from corporate welfare by replacing corporate welfare with government prohibition.

A moratorium says that even if a private company is willing to invest billions of dollars, pay its full energy costs, secure its own water supply, compensate communities for infrastructure, and build without taxpayer subsidies, Topeka should still tell it NO.

That's not an economic growth strategy.

Kansas can protect ratepayers, taxpayers, water resources, and national security without closing the door on private investment.

The better principle is:

No subsidies. No cost shifting. No special favors. No statewide ban.

Let businesses invest, and make them pay their own way.

That's what a genuinely free-market data center policy should look like. And Ty Masterson's policy is much closer to this ideal than Cindy Holscher's plan.

08/13/2026

Cindy Holscher says she has “no idea if Jesus was trans.”

But Scripture does.

Jesus is called "the Son", Mary is told she will bear a "son" (Luke 1:31), and Jesus is circumcised according to Jewish law (Luke 2:21).

Two-thousand years of Church history has never treated Christ’s s*x as some great mystery. And yet, Holscher's comment signals she views The Bible as clay in her hand.

You don’t get to reshape Jesus around your politics. Your politics are supposed to be reshaped by Jesus.

And that raises a deeper spiritual problem I've noticed with Cindy Holscher.

When our ideology gets the final word over Scripture, politics has stopped being politics. It has become an idol.

Faithfulness requires the humility to let God tell us when we are wrong.

Pride does the opposite: it assumes God must change to accommodate us

Her statement isn’t courageous Christianity.

It’s PRIDE dressed up as faith.

08/12/2026

Socialist Francesca Hong LOSES Wisconsin Governor primary to be the Democratic nominee.

Excellent.

08/07/2026

EVER WONDER WHY SOCIALISM PERSISTS DESPITE ITS FAILURES?

When socialism fails, the people who promoted it rarely pay the price.

The politician moves on.
The professor writes another book.
The activist finds another explanation.

But ordinary people live with the consequences.

They live with the shortages.
They live with the lost opportunities.
They live with the diminished freedom.

And history has shown us this again and again.

Venezuela went from being one of the wealthier nations in Latin America to suffering severe shortages of food, medicine, and basic necessities.

The Soviet Union produced repression, famine, and economic stagnation.

Cuba replaced a functioning market economy with decades of state control and political repression.

And then there are the comparisons that are difficult to explain away:

West Germany and East Germany.
South Korea and North Korea.
The people were not fundamentally different.

The systems were.

Yet whenever socialism fails, socialism itself is rarely placed in the dock.

There is always another excuse.
Another explanation.
Another reason why the failure supposedly had nothing to do with the system.

So why does socialism persist?

Because it appeals to a deeply human instinct: the belief that good intentions must surely produce good results.

But intentions are not outcomes.

Economist Ludwig von Mises identified one of socialism’s central weaknesses more than a century ago.

When government replaces markets and voluntary exchange with central planning, planners lose the information that prices provide.

No committee, ministry, or bureaucracy can fully know what millions of people want, which resources are scarce, where investment is most needed, or what should be produced.

The result is not mysterious.
Shortages in one place.
Waste in another.
And frustration everywhere.

That brings us to the central truth:

You cannot fix central planning simply by finding smarter central planners. The problem is the system itself.

Yet socialism continues to attract professors, politicians, activists, and intellectuals because promising government solutions is easy.

Living with the consequences of those promises is something else entirely.

And that may be the greatest reason socialism survives:

The people who sell the idea are rarely the people who pay the price when it fails.