Before he was asking Kansans to trust him with the state's finances as governor, Ty Masterson helped write the chapter Kansas is still trying to live down.

In 2012, Governor Sam Brownback slashed state income taxes without cutting spending to match — a plan supporters called an economic "experiment." Ty Masterson wasn't a bystander to that experiment. He was one of its architects and most loyal defenders in the Kansas Senate.

The math didn't work. Within a few years, the state was short hundreds of millions of dollars. Lawmakers tried to paper over the hole by passing a budget that spent $100 million more than Kansas collected — a move so reckless that former Republican Governor Mike Hayden said of the legislature, "They should be ashamed." The deficit kept growing. It hit $350 million.

To help fill the hole his own tax plan had blown in the budget, Masterson voted on June 7, 2015 for what was, at the time, the largest tax increase in Kansas history — roughly $400 million, raising the sales tax, the cigarette tax, and more. His vote was the bare minimum needed for it to pass.

By 2016, Kansas voters had seen enough. Forty legislative races flipped against Brownback, Masterson, and their allies. In 2017, a bipartisan coalition — 18 Republicans and 9 Democrats in the Senate alone — voted to override Brownback's veto and kill the tax experiment for good. The new Senate majority removed Masterson from the Ways and Means Committee, the body that writes the state budget.

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Why it matters now

Ty Masterson is campaigning for governor on a promise to cut taxes again. But as Senate President, he's already shown the pattern is repeating: over the past two years, the legislature under his leadership approved spending roughly $700 million more than the state collected in revenue, covered for now by draining Kansas's cash reserves — the same reserves built up specifically to avoid another Brownback-style crisis.

Kansas has been here before. It didn't go well the first time.

Sources

Kansas Reflector, "Ty Masterson shares with Sam Brownback the stigma of Kansas' failed tax experiment," Sept. 2026 · Scott Rothschild reporting on the June 7, 2015 Senate tax vote · Kansas Legislature official voting records · Michael A. Smith & H. Edward Flentje, eds., Reform and Reaction: The Arc of Kansas Politics (University Press of Kansas, 2025), ch. 6.

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