This fervor for budget-cutting is hardly unique to Kansas. At the federal level, the opposition party in the White House has kept the Republican majority in Congress from making much headway. But there are 23 states in the Union controlled entirely by Republicans, from statehouse to governor’s mansion — 24, if you count Nebraska’s technically nonpartisan, unicameral legislature — compared with just six (and Washington, D.C.) on the Democratic side. In these Republican states, the combination of the Great Recession with the anti-Obama elections of 2010 and 2014 has allowed legislators to make deeper cuts to the size and scope of government than has been possible in Washington for decades. In 2012, according to a report by the Pew Charitable Trusts, state governments spent $9 billion less than they did the previous year — the first such decline in 50 years. Many of these cuts have fallen on education. In Pennsylvania, for example, Gov. Tom Corbett cut funding for the state’s public universities by 20 percent, a compromise from his original proposal of 50 percent. Last month in Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker, backed by Republican majorities in the state House and Senate, cut $250 million from the University of Wisconsin system.

As many tax-cutting states have found later on, the party’s deep-seated opposition to tax increases of any kind can make balancing the budget a high-wire act. In Alabama this year, the state’s Republican governor, Robert Bentley, vetoed a bill from the Republican-controlled statehouse that would have removed $200 million from the state’s budget, including 5 percent cuts for Medicaid, prisons and the state’s department of mental health. Instead, he called the Legislature into a special session and asked for more than $300 million in new taxes.

The situation in Kansas was just as dire, if not more so. Brownback began the year by cutting education in the face of the state’s budget crisis, but he also proposed that legislators raise taxes on cigarettes and alcohol. The new taxes were part of an effort to close a staggering gap for fiscal 2016, estimated at $650 million in January, or more than 10 percent of the state’s $6 billion general fund. More urgent, the state still needed to cut about $300 million from this year’s budget as, month after month, tax revenues continued to arrive well below expectations. In January alone, the state took in $47 million less than anticipated. As Brownback saw it, these new taxes on consumption were necessary so that his priority — the march to zero on income taxes — could proceed.

Uncle Gene is not an architect of the march to zero, but he supports it, and he is one of the legislators in the Kansas statehouse who has helped to enact it and to preserve it. He is the vice chairman of the Tax Committee in the Kansas House, and he also sits on the Appropriations Committee. There are more important figures — the speaker of the House, the Senate president, the leaders of the Tax and Appropriations Committees in both houses, for starters — in the statehouse, but Gene is in the next tier. He’s one of the people whose support the governor usually relies on to get something done, according to Tim Shallenburger, Brownback’s legislative liaison and a former speaker of the Kansas House.

I called Gene in January, as this year’s legislative session began in Topeka. For a Kansan, and a Suellentrop, Gene is a talker, but if you met him you would probably find him a little bit reserved, although not taciturn. On this call, he sounded worried. ‘‘People are leaving Kansas,’’ he told me. The state has no mountains and no beaches, and thousands of jobs that were lost during the Great Recession, especially in Wichita’s aircraft industry, never returned. The march to zero, which includes an already-passed provision that exempts the owners of 330,000 businesses and farms in Kansas from income tax, was designed, Gene said, to turn Kansas into a different sort of tourist attraction. As he and his fellow conservatives see it, it’s an ‘‘open for business’’ sign, one they hope will draw free enterprise to the state, perhaps akin to the way the national debate over the expansion of slavery once drew young abolitionists from New England to the plains. At the very least, they hope it will prevent young people and existing businesses from moving elsewhere, to places with ski lodges or surf shops.