A promotional video for the Kansas Chamber of Commerce includes endorsements by top political leaders in the state. “I don’t know where we would be without the chamber,” Gov. Sam Brownback (in photo) says in the video. Senate President Susan Wagle, R-Wichita, notes that the chamber “was involved in the elections for both House and Senate members” and that it “helped change the environment in the Capitol.” The chamber’s political action committee spent more than $1 million during the 2012 legislative election, much of it directed at defeating moderate Republicans. One of those purged lawmakers, former Sen. Ruth Teichman of Stafford, wondered if the chamber is now trying to convince Kansas that “getting rid of us” was a good thing, the Hutchinson News reported. Also of note in the video is Neeli Bendapudi, the dean of the University of Kansas School of Business. She says that “the Kansas Chamber and the University of Kansas are united for business.” When contacted by the Hutchinson News, Bendapudi said she did not intend to speak for the entire university. “I honestly did not think it through,” she said.
Some top U.S., Mexican and Canadian trade officials are in Wichita for the 37th-annual World Trade Week. Thursday’s conference, organized by the World Trade Council of Wichita, focuses on the North American Free Trade Agreement, the largest free-trade agreement in the world. Mexico and Canada are also the top two export markets for Kansas. Panel discussions include legal and trade regulations, tax policies, transportation and trade strategies. The conference is a good opportunity to network with trade officials and companies.
Wichita City Council member Paul Gray used an agenda item on swimming pool improvements at last week’s meeting to blast the Americans With Disabilities Act. Gray, a contractor who works in commercial construction, said he appreciated the sensitivity of such issues and has friends and relatives with disabilities, but that making facilities ADA-compliant can add $15,000-$20,000 to a $80,000 project and prove too much for mom-and-pop businesses. “Some little bureaucrat sits in a room and draws a picture and says, ‘This is the rules everybody has to follow,’ but they far exceed the requirements of people that are handicapped,” Gray said. “We treat the world as if everybody is blind and in a wheelchair, and that is not the circumstance. We are driving our economy into the ground with stuff like this.” Gray voted for the item, as did reluctant fellow council member Pete Meitzner. Hearing Gray’s rant about the 23-year-old ADA, it was hard to believe he was talking about what then-Sen. Bob Dole called “fair and balanced legislation that carefully blends the rights of people with disabilities … with the legitimate needs of the American business community.”
Congratulations to Tim Chase on his new job as president of the Greater Wichita Economic Development Coalition. Chase comes to Wichita after 12 years as president of the Wichita Falls (Texas) Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and with an impressive range of experience in economic development. It’s been nearly two years since the last permanent GWEDC president left – too long, especially amid such a deep downturn. Expectations are high for Chase’s ability to coordinate our community’s efforts to attract and retain businesses and to market itself not only as a hub for aviation manufacturing, research and training but as a fertile place for high-tech innovation and entrepreneurship.
The Kansas Chamber of Commerce, newly led by former House Speaker Mike O’Neal, has an aggressive legislative agenda aimed at phasing out all individual and corporate income taxes and pushing for changes related to state employees’ pensions and unions’ political influence. But both Kent Eckles, the chamber’s vice president for governmental affairs, and Eric Stafford, the chamber’s senior legislative affairs director, told Associated Press that the chamber will stay out of the debate about changing how appellate judges are chosen. O’Neal has said the Kansas Supreme Court stepped over the line in requiring the Legislature to increase school funding. But he once responded to a proposed constitutional amendment to change how Supreme Court justices were chosen by asking: “What’s wrong with what we’ve got now?”
The Kansas Chamber of Commerce recently announced that the keynote speaker for its 2013 annual dinner will be syndicated columnist and author Cal Thomas, whose commentaries have appeared in The Eagle since 1989. The dinner will be held at 5:30 p.m. Feb. 5 at the Kansas Expocentre in Topeka, with Neeli Bendapudi, dean of the University of Kansas School of Business, as master of ceremonies. “For years I have admired Cal Thomas’ thoughtful and challenging literary contributions to American political dialogue,” said Kansas chamber president Mike O’Neal. “We’re excited to bring such a leader to Kansas during the opening weeks of the 2013 legislative session.” For more information, go to www.kansaschamber.org.
The Wichita Metro Chamber of Commerce and other groups want the state to stop raiding the transportation program to cover its budget shortfalls. “Dedicated transportation funding streams should only be used for the transportation program,” the chamber’s 2013 agenda states. But Kansas Department of Transportation Secretary Mike King indicated last week that he is ready and willing for the state to continue using his department as a piggy bank. He told the Hutchinson/Reno County Chamber of Commerce that his agency has money it will be willing to offer to cover budget shortfalls for the next fiscal year or two, the Hutchinson News reported. “We’ll be asked to give money up for other uses,” King said. He said his department can get by because of low bid prices, inflation and bonding rates. “We’re ahead of the game on the cost side,” he said. But former KDOT Secretary Deb Miller warned when she resigned a year ago that continuing to raid the transportation plan could jeopardize the 10-year highway plan.
The Wichita Metro Chamber of Commerce’s 2013 legislative agenda calls for even more tax cuts and less regulation – what you’d expect based on the chamber’s recent history and aggressive 2012 involvement in purging moderate Republicans from the Statehouse. But the chamber also wants the state to continue providing funding for the National Institute for Aviation Research, the National Center for Aviation Training and the Wichita airfare subsidy program, and to retain the historic preservation tax credit and to stop diverting transportation plan funding. The state can only do those things if it has sufficient revenues, which already are projected to plummet as the 2012 tax cuts take effect.
How did Kansas fare on Forbes’ latest list of the “world’s 71 most powerful people”? Koch Industries executives Charles and David Koch (in photo) shared 41st place, and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius placed 68th. “The former governor of Kansas is the person in charge of implementing Obamacare,” Forbes wrote. “Sebelius’ decisions will shape American lives – and the insurance, medical and pharmaceutical industries – for decades.” Charles Koch also appears on the cover of the latest Forbes, for an article titled “Inside the Koch Empire: How the Brothers Plan to Reshape America.” Calling the presidential election results “bitterly disappointing,” David Koch told the magazine: “We raised a lot of money and mobilized an awful lot of people, and we lost, plain and simple. We’re going to study what worked, what didn’t work, and improve our efforts in the future. We’re not going to roll over and play dead.” Charles Koch said the goal is “ “true democracy,” where people “can run their own lives and choose what they want to buy, choose how to spend their money.” Forbes’ five most powerful people? President Obama, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Russian President Vladimir Putin, entrepreneur and philanthropist Bill Gates, and Pope Benedict XVI.
Merging the inspection and code enforcement departments of the city of Wichita and Sedgwick County has proved no quick or simple task, as exemplified by the 263 pages that the new Wichita/Sedgwick County Unified Building and Trade Code takes up in Tuesday’s Wichita City Council agenda. The diligence and problem solving over the past year have been impressive, with plenty of input from builders, building trades groups and other stakeholders. With 31-year Wichita Police Department veteran Tom Stolz (in photo) as its recently named director, the new Metropolitan Area Building and Construction Department promises to be a benefit to the community and its economy. Like the Wichita-Sedgwick County Metropolitan Area Planning Department, it also will provide a model for more functional city-county consolidation.
Most businesses’ main interaction with government is paying taxes. Government doesn’t help them succeed but rather only erects barriers to overcome. The cost of government taxes and regulations are part of the overhead of a business. The greater the cost of the government overhead, the fewer people a business can hire. The major challenge for President Obama is to realize there is little he can do to help the average business in our country. We want to make a profit so that we can invest to grow our businesses or reward our employees and ourselves for successfully taking on the challenges and uncertainty of business. We also would welcome a little respect for the long hours we put in without any guarantees of reward. We would appreciate some common sense on regulation where absolutes can’t apply but cost-benefit analysis makes sense. – Peter Rush
The canard that President Obama is anti-business is a propaganda remnant from Mitt Romney’s failed presidential campaign. Obama, after all, was the president who bailed out Wall Street with the Troubled Asset Relief Program. TARP and other Obama corporate rescue programs, after all, benefited such goliath corporations as Bank of America, Citigroup, AIG, General Motors and Chrysler – saving tens of thousands of jobs. Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the economic stimulus package of 2009, provided direct and indirect assistance to small and large businesses through the hiring of construction firms and related firms to rebuild roads, highways, rail lines, airports and telecommunications infrastructure. Obama actually is saving American capitalism by reining in its excesses and plowing under its inequities. – Wayne Madsen
The Kansas Chamber of Commerce’s new president, Mike O’Neal (in photo), said that the focus of his organization is on what benefits the state as a whole from a business perspective. “There may be times there’s a local issue that affects you that may not fit squarely with the legislative agenda at the state level,” he told members of the Garden City Area Chamber of Commerce last week. The Kansas Chamber’s push for tax cuts, regardless of the impact on schools and other important services, and the hundreds of thousands of dollars it spent trying to defeat local legislative candidates have caused a number of local chambers to pull out of the state organization. O’Neal also said that he does not believe there will be a state budget deficit, even though state revenue estimators recently forecast a $705 million drop in tax collections next fiscal year.
Congratulations to the leaders on both sides of the negotiating table at the Machinists union and Bombardier Learjet, whose efforts led to Saturday’s vote to approve the contract offer and Monday’s end of the five-week strike. The best feature of the new five-year contract is that it gets Learjet’s skilled workers back to the business of manufacturing outstanding aircraft that will be needed as the economy rebounds.
The latest turn of events in Hawker Beechcraft’s bankruptcy raises new questions for workers and the community, but at least ends the worrying about the company’s future under Chinese ownership. Wichita should welcome the stand-alone company’s familiar new name, Beechcraft Corp., and narrowed focus on the products it makes most profitably – turboprop, piston, special mission and trainer/attack aircraft – and its high margin parts, maintenance, repairs and refurbishment businesses. The proposed $1.9 billion purchase by Superior Aircraft Beijing always seemed like a stretch, and left a question mark over the defense business. (At least the Wichita company gets to keep Superior’s $50 million deposit.) Now the concern shifts to what will become of the Hawker jet lines. “The go-forward business plan we have developed with our creditors ensures that we will emerge from this process in a strong operational and financial position, with an enhanced ability to compete well into the future,” Hawker Beechcraft CEO Steve Miller said in a Thursday statement. Now elected officials need to be engaged with Miller and other executives to ensure that Wichita and Kansas are as crucial to Beechcraft’s future as they’ve been to its past.
With the Kansas Chamber of Commerce having pursued a more political agenda in recent years, the job as its president and CEO should be a good fit for longtime Rep. Mike O’Neal, R-Hutchinson, who is retiring after four years as House speaker. It also makes sense as a “thank you” to O’Neal, given how aggressively the chamber helped Gov. Sam Brownback push for the Legislature to slash income taxes. In fact, the cuts only became law this year because of O’Neal’s gambit to ram through a deeply flawed bill and pre-empt a Senate attempt to kill any chance of tax cuts. After that showdown, the governor’s budget director was heard telling O’Neal, “We really appreciate that. We’ll always remember it.”
Charles G. Koch, chairman and CEO of Wichita-based Koch Industries, penned a Monday commentary in the Wall Street Journal headlined “Corporate Cronyism Harms America” pointing to such government policies as “affordable housing” quotas, the Community Reinvestment Act and the “Federal Reserve’s artificial, below-market interest-rate policy” as causes of “the dreadful condition of our economy.” Koch wrote: “Far too many businesses have been all too eager to lobby for maintaining and increasing subsidies and mandates paid by taxpayers and consumers. This growing partnership between business and government is a destructive force, undermining not just our economy and our political system, but the very foundations of our culture.” Koch acknowledged that some of the energy subsidies and mandates benefit Koch Industries but called for an end to such “distorting” and “corrupting” policies, concluding: “If America re-establishes the proper role of business in society, all kinds of benefits will accrue. Our economy will rebound. Our liberties will be restored. And when President Obama tells an entrepreneur ‘You didn’t build that,’ everyone will know better.”
The Wichita Metro Chamber of Commerce chose wisely for its Nov. 12 annual meeting, inviting former Defense Secretary Robert Gates to be the featured speaker. Besides his respected record of public service under eight presidents, Gates is a native Wichitan and a 1961 graduate of East High School. The event’s meaning will be all the greater because of its proximity to Veterans Day and theme of honoring the U.S. military. When he addressed East High’s commencement three years ago, Gates said, “I believe a Kansas upbringing imparts qualities that have been a source of strength for me over the years: an enduring optimism and idealism, a love of country, and dedication to citizenship and service.”
Congress and the administration need to unleash the dynamism of the private sector by adopting policies that will result in the economic growth necessary to reduce our deficits and put our citizens back to work. A reduction in the corporate tax rate to the average rate of other industrialized countries – about 25 percent – would eliminate a great disadvantage faced by businesses. The basic strategy is to achieve these lower rates by eliminating exemptions and other tax breaks, essentially broadening, flattening and simplifying the tax structure. It’s a daunting assignment, but with hard work and a focused effort, comprehensive reform can be accomplished within a year. At the same time, the United States must modernize its international tax system to enable American companies to compete more effectively in foreign markets. Comprehensive tax reform is a significant step we can take today that will improve American competitiveness, increase economic growth and put the nation on the path toward fiscal stability. – John Engler, Business Roundtable
Thanks to record profits, essentially zero short-term borrowing costs and extremely low effective tax rates, U.S. companies are sitting on more than a trillion dollars in cash. Further business tax breaks will do nothing to provide the real incentive that companies need in order to invest in our economy: strong consumer demand. Claims that federal business taxes are too high usually cite the nominal corporate tax rate of 35 percent. But what really matters is not the official rate, but how much companies actually pay, and by that measure corporate taxes are already very low. A study released in 2011 by Citizens for Tax Justice of 280 Fortune 500 companies found that their average effective tax rate over the previous two years was just 17.3 percent, less than half the statuary rate. Instead of cutting already low effective rates, corporate tax reform should focus on ending incentives to send profits and jobs overseas and making sure all companies pay their fair share. – Don Kusler, Americans for Democratic Action
Kansas Chamber of Commerce president Kent Beisner dismissed the Newton Area Chamber of Commerce’s decision to drop its state membership, saying that “smaller-town chambers” don’t like to get involved in politics. But it isn’t politics per se that they object to; it’s the state chamber’s extremism that led it to try to purge quality lawmakers such as state Sen. Carolyn McGinn (in photo), R-Sedgwick. And it isn’t only smaller towns that object. Local chambers that have pulled out of the state chamber include the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce and those in Lawrence, Lenexa, Shawnee, Hutchinson, Hays, Arkansas City, Winfield, Salina and Kansas City, Kan. In Wichita, the debate is whether the Wichita Metro Chamber of Commerce and its political action committee have become too much like the Kansas chamber.
The reaction to Chick-fil-A president Dan Cathy saying that he supports traditional marriages “tells you everything you need to know about certain liberals who believe every sort of speech, activity and expression should be protected, except the speech, activity and expression of evangelical Christians,” columnist Cal Thomas wrote. He argued that the controversy and calls by some to boycott Chick-fil-A are more than an economic battle. “It is a First Amendment issue,” he wrote. “Freedom of speech is guaranteed by the Constitution. Cathy has a right to his opinion.”
Good for the leadership of the Wichita Metro Chamber of Commerce for deciding to appoint a task force to examine the relationship between the chamber and its political action committee. When the PAC turned its back on three staunchly pro-chamber state senators in order to endorse and fund their challengers – even sending out mailings linking the incumbents to Boeing’s decision to leave Wichita and calling the city’s business climate “uncompetitive” – it understandably upset some chamber members. It’s a further concern that some of the PAC’s favored candidates include recent PAC insiders, and that the PAC is secretive about its board members and decision making. Now, the concerned members of the chamber need to ensure their voices and concerns are heard by the task force.
News that Whole Foods Market is coming to the new Waterfront Plaza at 13th and Webb Road was a dream come true for many food-savvy Wichitans, and another welcome sign that the economy isn’t getting in the way of the community’s progress. The Austin-based chain is the go-to grocery in many communities for its natural and organic foods. Whole Foods will join new arrivals Fresh Market and Natural Grocers by Vitamin Cottage and long-established GreenAcres Market, making northeast Wichita the prime place to buy what it takes to eat healthfully and well. Still leading the wish list for Wichita: Cheesecake Factory.
Columnist Andres Oppenheimer thinks that President Obama’s campaign ad attacking Mitt Romney for outsourcing jobs is “intellectually dishonest,” and that Romney’s response blasting Obama as being “the real outsourcer-in-chief” is “pathetic.” Oppenheimer wrote: “In fact, both Obama and Romney support outsourcing, the long-standing practice whereby U.S. companies manufacture overseas goods that are too costly to produce at home. And they should. Outsourcing is not only a necessity in today’s global economy, but often helps the U.S. economy by making U.S. exports more competitive abroad, and by allowing U.S. consumers to pay less for many goods.”
Four years ago, the Wichita Metro Chamber of Commerce and its political action committee fought hard to keep professional anti-taxer Karl Peterjohn off the Sedgwick County Commission bench in what Peterjohn called a “political jihad” against him. In one of the strongest arguments against Peterjohn at the time, Spirit AeroSystems CEO Jeff Turner said, “If his views were to prevail in this community, companies like ours would be hard-pressed to invest anymore in this community.” Peterjohn won, though, and by early 2010, then-chamber president Bryan Derreberry said “that is all old history.” Still, it was striking to see Peterjohn’s name last week on the list of endorsements by the chamber’s political action committee, along with his challenger for re-election in the Aug. 7 GOP primary, Wichita City Council member Jeff Longwell. Though Peterjohn hasn’t been the wrecking ball the business community had feared, in part because he’s mostly been in the minority on the commission, Peterjohn hasn’t really changed his views. The Wichita chamber PAC and its priorities certainly have changed, though.
The Kansas Chamber of Commerce’s political action committee is spending big bucks trying to purge moderate Republicans from the Kansas Senate. But it is worth noting that the state chamber doesn’t represent the views of many local chambers. For example, the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce’s PAC endorsed moderate lawmakers, including Sens. Jean Schodorf, R-Wichita, and Carolyn McGinn, R-Sedgwick. And speaking of chambers, what was the Wichita Metro Chamber of Commerce’s PAC thinking when it sent out a campaign mailer implying that Boeing is leaving Wichita because of taxes and regulations? Boeing said it was the overhead on its large facility and wages (along with a reduction in military contracts) that made its Wichita plant uncompetitive, not taxes and regulations. Is this the message the chamber sends to businesses that are considering relocating here? Find the Wichita chamber PAC’s endorsements here.
A promotional video for the Kansas Chamber of Commerce includes endorsements by top political leaders in the state. “I don’t know where we would be without the chamber,” Gov. Sam Brownback (in photo) says in the video. Senate President Susan Wagle, R-Wichita, notes that the chamber “was involved in the elections for both House and Senate members” and that it “helped change the environment in the Capitol.” The chamber’s political action committee spent more than $1 million during the 2012 legislative election, much of it directed at defeating moderate Republicans. One of those purged lawmakers, former Sen. Ruth Teichman of Stafford, wondered if the chamber is now trying to convince Kansas that “getting rid of us” was a good thing, the Hutchinson News reported. Also of note in the video is Neeli Bendapudi, the dean of the University of Kansas School of Business. She says that “the Kansas Chamber and the University of Kansas are united for business.” When contacted by the Hutchinson News, Bendapudi said she did not intend to speak for the entire university. “I honestly did not think it through,” she said.
