The Topeka Capital-Journal: Kansas Tax System Puts Higher Burden on Poor
media mentionThe Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy examined each state’s income, sales, excise and property taxes to determine how much the average person at various income levels would pay. In Kansas, people earning less than $20,000 paid 11.1 percent of their income in taxes on average, while people earning more than $439,000 paid only about 3.6 percent of their income.
Those numbers, along with a comparison between how the percentages the top 1 percent and middle 60 percent of earners paid, put Kansas as the ninth-most-regressive state in the country for taxes, according to ITEP’s index. Tax policies are called progressive if wealthier people pay a higher percentage of their income as taxes, and regressive if poorer people pay more.