TPiH 32 – Chris Courtwright

I want to thank everyone for all of your patience, prayers, and support during the past couple of weeks. And I especially want to thank Jackson for stepping in to keep That Podcast in Hutch rolling while I focused on a family crisis. Mitch is out of the hospital, working toward recovery, and doing much better than the first days after the accident. So many of you reached out with thoughts, prayers, and words of encouragement. Our family feels blessed to have such a good community of thoughtful and caring people. I’m glad to be back in the studio – and this week my guest is Chris Courtwright. He’s a member of the Governor’s Council on Tax Reform, and he worked for 34 years as the principal economist for the Kansas Department of Legislative Research. In that role, he provided members of the legislature with non-partisan economic information to help inform policy decisions. He also served on the prestigious Consensus Revenue Estimating group – which crunches data and trends in the economy to create an estimate of tax receipts in the coming year. This group’s work forms the basis of every governor’s budget – and it is the information on which all budget and tax decisions are based each fiscal year. Chris and I talk about his experiences in those roles, as well as the ongoing discussion about the effort to eliminate the state sales tax on groceries. This is an idea that’s been talked about for years – but there’s been a real effort to get it done this session. Chris has a lot of historical knowledge about the sales tax on groceries, and I think you’ll find his insights interesting and educational.