A $4 gallon of milk is a kitchen-table problem, not an abstraction.
What's wrong. What it costs the patient. What we're doing about it. This page lays out Doc's record on cost of living in three layers: the diagnosis, the prescription, and the receipts.
That is how a doctor explains a diagnosis: what's wrong, what it costs the patient, what we're going to do about it.
What we're doing about it.
- Working Families Tax Cuts — TCJA permanence, voted yea
- Methane-fee CRA cosponsor — H.J.Res.35 signed March 2025
- Voted no on multiple stopgap continuing resolutions
In detail.
Cost of living in Kansas is groceries, gas, fertilizer, housing — and the input costs that hit a Kansas farmer before the harvest does. The 12-month CPI for the Midwest region (which includes Kansas) was +4.1% as of April 2026, per the BLS Mountain-Plains Information Office. Energy alone is up 15.7% over twelve months. None of that lives in an economic abstract: it lives at the gas pump, at the grocery store, and on the input invoices a Kansas farmer pays before a single bushel ships.
Doc voted yea on the Working Families Tax Cuts in 2025 to make the 2017 tax cuts permanent — the small business deduction, full expensing, R&D expensing, the expanded child tax credit. He has voted no on multiple stopgap continuing resolutions that piled on spending without offsets, because in Kansas, you do not run a household budget by spending money you do not have.
On the input-cost side: S. 4418 cuts phosphate fertilizer costs by more than 20%, roughly $150 per ton, for Kansas growers. The methane-fee CRA Doc cosponsored (H.J.Res.35, signed March 2025) voided the EPA implementing rule that would have raised costs on natural gas operations. The fight on E15 keeps year-round demand for Kansas corn-grown ethanol, which keeps a lid on fuel costs. Every one of those is a line on a Kansas family budget.