I admit to being sucker for nostalgia. I love to pick up old books, page through them and say, “Now that was a heck of a year.” In fact, I’m saying that now about 2006.

 Maybe that’s because I’ve been looking through the 2007 Kansas Economic Report, a money-man’s snapshot of the previous year, ‘06, the glorious year Kansas redeemed itself to blue-state America by electing Paul Morrison to be attorney-general for a few months.

Talk about the good old days! There they are: 39 number-filled pages of economic triumph, the annotated crown of Kathleen Sebelius’ golden governorship as compiled by her labor secretary. Let’s go back in time and visit a few of the report’s highlights, reading between the lines along the way.

•  A good start: We learn on page one that in ’06, Kansas added 20,500 jobs. “This was the strongest recorded growth in employment since 1998,” the reports says. Page two says look out for more “robust growth” through 2008.
• The health industry’s booming, says page 7. I guess this means there are more sick people in Kansas than ever. That’s good news! The bad news is on the next page: “Despite this good news, Figure 6 indicates a slowing pace of growth in this industry in Kansas since 2002, while nationwide growth rates have increased in 2005 and 2006.” I hate figure 6.
• Employment? Better in Kansas than in the rest of America, says a cheerful page 9. Then comes dour 10: It’s all going to go south. What we need, hints the next page with its dismal work-force numbers, is more laborers. Now where can we find lots of cheap laborers? a) Vermont. b) Hollywood, California. c) Mexico. (The correct answer is "si.")
• Then the news that the more education you have, the more you get paid. Couple that with this factoid: After nurses, the jobs Kansas most needs to fill are for fast-food workers, janitors and “orderlies.” Disorder must be on the rise. Plus, Kansas also hires lots of teachers, which suggests an increase in the untaught.
• Then a bunch of GDP and personal income stuff. Bottom line: Kansans make less than other Americans. This is the dull part.

But then, on the very last page of the report, the surprise ending: A number that has shot up faster than subsidized corn. Under Gov. Sebelius the thing that’s grown faster than housing, incomes, employment, education, gambling debt, fishing licenses or anything else is poverty:

The number of Kansans estimated to be living below the poverty threshold in 2004 totaled 297,733, or more than 11.0 percent of the total population. From 2000 to 2004, Kansas poverty increased 26.6 percent while poverty in the U.S. went up 17.3 percent. From 2000 to 2004, the number of people in Kansas living below the poverty level increased more rapidly than the state’s population as a whole, with a 26.6 percent increase in poverty and a 1.7 percent increase in population.

Since a low in 2000, the number of people under the age of 18 in poverty in Kansas has increased by nearly 20.0 percent, reaching more than 98,000 people in 2004. This rate was higher than the national rate which increased at 12.5 percent. Additionally, the number of people under age five in poverty in Kansas has increased 27.5 percent in the past five years compared to 15.1 percent for the nation.

Now of course all the numbers in the governor’s labor department report have a political value. The dramatic poverty figures may be intended to help pave the way to closing what the report calls “the gap between rich and poor.” That kind of gap-closing device usually is called a “tax increase.”

But numbers like these can also have unanticipated consequences. Just think how impressed folks will be when she runs for vice-president on Obama’s ticket and some wily Republican points out that Kansas has a lot more “people under age five” (technically, these people are actually “children”) who live in poverty than when she took office.

In fact, the increase in poor kids under Sebelius is around five points a year, so far. At that rate, by the time she leaves the governor’s office in 2008 to make her run for the vice-presidency, there’ll have been an increase of something like 30 percent in the number of “people under age five” living in poverty. That's impressive.

On the other hand, if Sebelius has to hang around until 2010 to run for Sam Brownback’s senate seat, almost half the kids in Kansas will be impoverished urchins. The place will look like something out of Dickens, with kids eating out of wooden bowls in dark, brick buildings called "consolidated schools." They’ll have to rename the governor’s mansion to reflect her achievement. Maybe something like “Bleak House.”

Denis Boyles is the author of more than a dozen books, including, most recently,  Superior, Nebraska, a book mostly about Kansas named by the New York publisher after a nice town in Nebraska because, “you know, Kansas, Nebraska—they’re all the same.”

Send comments to denis.boyles@kansasliberty.com