Trickledown Economics has failed once again. It doesn’t stop the purveyors of this nonsense. It never has and likely never will. Kansas Governor Brownback, a Republican, came into office two years ago with a very conservative agenda. Two years later, the state is running huge deficits. The state has suffered credit downgrades by two credit agencies. The state is raiding its transportation trust fund to pay the state’s bills. Its schools are under funded by at least 100 billion dollars. Healthcare clinics and hospitals in rural areas, which is most of the state, are closing because the state has, like good Republicans everywhere, turned down Medicaid expansion money. Taxes on the middle class have gone up. Taxes on the state’s wealthiest citizens (e.g. Koch brothers) have gone down. Electricity rates have gone from 9 cents per kilowatt hour to 13 cents per kilo watt hour not because of any increased cost but because of cost shifting. Industrial consumers of electricity pay about what half residential customers in the state pay. The state has been shifting electrical production costs from industry to individuals. Sales and property taxes have increased while state income taxes for the state’s wealthiest residents have fallen. And Kansas has lagged its neighbors in every metric of economic growth and prosperity. Governor Brownback did what any self-respecting Republican would do under similar circumstances; he blamed Obama for his shortcomings. Last time I checked, Obama didn’t have anything to do with the Kansas budget. Unfortunately this is what passes for Republican prosperity. Brownback was stupid enough or duplicitous enough to enact the Republican agenda line for line and word for word and now he is reaping the harvest or lack thereof. I guess the Kansas Miracle is that there was someone dumb enough or duplicitous enough to actually enact the Republican economic agenda. It should be an example for the rest of the nation of what not to do as if we needed one so soon after The Great Recession. Some folk are slow learners. Paul Krugman: Failed Kansas experiment highlights limits of tax cuts Posted: Monday, July 7, 2014 8:20 am Associated Press | Two years ago, Kansas embarked on a remarkable fiscal experiment: It sharply slashed income taxes without any clear idea of what would replace the lost revenue. Sam Brownback, the governor, proposed the legislation — in percentage terms, the largest tax cut in one year any state has ever enacted — in close consultation with economist Arthur Laffer. And Brownback predicted the cuts would jump-start an economic boom — "Look out, Texas," he proclaimed. But Kansas isn't booming — in fact, its economy is lagging both neighboring states and America as a whole. Meanwhile, the state's budget has plunged deep into deficit, provoking a Moody's downgrade of its debt. There's an important lesson here — but it's not what you think. Yes, the Kansas debacle shows tax cuts don't have magical powers, but we already knew that. The real lesson from Kansas is the enduring power of bad ideas, as long as those ideas serve the interests of the right people. Why, after all, should anyone believe at this late date in supply-side economics, which claims that tax cuts boost the economy so much that they largely if not entirely pay for themselves? The doctrine crashed and burned two decades ago, when just about everyone on the right — after claiming, speciously, that the economy's performance under Ronald Reagan validated their doctrine — went on to predict that Bill Clinton's tax hike on the wealthy would cause a recession if not an outright depression. What actually happened was a spectacular economic expansion. Nor is it just liberals who long have considered supply-side economics and those promoting it to have been discredited by experience. In 1998, in the first edition of his best-selling economics textbook, Harvard's N. Gregory Mankiw — very much a Republican and later chairman of George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers — famously wrote about the damage done by "charlatans and cranks." In particular, he highlighted the role of "a small group of economists" who "advised presidential candidate Ronald Reagan that an across-the-board cut in income tax rates would raise tax revenue." Chief among that "small group" was none other than Art Laffer. And it's not as if supply-siders later redeemed themselves. On the contrary, they've been as ludicrously wrong in recent years as they were in the 1990s. For example, five years have passed since Laffer warned Americans that "we can expect rapidly rising prices and much, much higher interest rates over the next four or five years." Just about everyone in his camp agreed. But what we got instead was low inflation and record-low interest rates. So how did the charlatans and cranks end up dictating policy in Kansas and, to a more limited extent, in other states? Follow the money. For the Brownback tax cuts didn't emerge out of thin air. They closely followed a blueprint laid out by the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, which also has supported a series of economic studies purporting to show that tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy will promote rapid economic growth. The studies are embarrassingly bad, and the council's Board of Scholars — which includes both Laffer and Stephen Moore of the Heritage Foundation — doesn't exactly shout credibility. But it's good enough for antigovernment work. What is ALEC? It's a secretive group, financed by major corporations, that drafts model legislation for conservative state-level politicians. Ed Pilkington of The Guardian, who acquired a number of leaked ALEC documents, describes it as "almost a dating service between politicians at the state level, local elected politicians and many of America's biggest companies." And most of ALEC's efforts are directed, not surprisingly, at privatization, deregulation and tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. And I do mean for the wealthy. While ALEC supports big income-tax cuts, it calls for increases in the sales tax — which fall most heavily on lower-income households — and reductions in tax-based support for working households. So its agenda involves cutting taxes at the top while actually increasing taxes at the bottom, as well as cutting social services. But how can you justify enriching the already wealthy while making life harder for those struggling to get by? The answer is, you need an economic theory claiming that such a policy is the key to prosperity for all. So supply-side economics fills a need backed by lots of money, and the fact that it keeps failing doesn't matter. And the Kansas debacle won't matter either. Oh, it will briefly give states considering similar policies pause. But the effect won't last long, because faith in tax-cut magic isn't about evidence; it's about finding reasons to give powerful interests what they want. Paul Krugman is a Nobel Prize-winning economist, a professor at Princeton University and a columnist for the New York Times. http://www.postbulletin.com/archive...cle_72e384bf-ebf7-50b0-963e-fd87cb905b56.html
There's No Place Like ... Kansas In truth, Joe, I'm dubious. Not that the Kansas Miracle isn't a disaster or debacle or whatever, but this is Kansas. We know what the polling is worth; it's all over the map on this race. And the question remains whether voters who celebrate greed, bigotry, and terrorism—i.e., the Kansas majority—have enough self-awareness left to recognize just how much of an embarrassment Gov. Brownback actually is. I've got my eye on this one, too, but I won't be convinced until the return is certified. And even then I won't believe it until Paul Davis is actually sworn in. It's Kansas, man. And if there is one thing we already know about Kansas, it is that Kansas openly discriminates against reality. It's easy enough for a Kansan to tell a pollster one thing, but quite another for them to actually cast the ballot. I don't know if you've ever experienced that set of circumstances where you actually affirmatively find out someone, for some reason, decided to lie about how he voted. But if you have, you know how weird it looks and sounds to the one, and normal it actually is to the other.
I live in Kansas. I have family in Kansas who are rock solid gun toting Republicans and they are pretty disappointed with Brownback. As you know, it's a tough hoe to tow for any Democrat in this state. Many of Republicans in this state would rather be dead than vote for a Democrat. Those folks are so disappointed with Brownback, they just might stay home this year. Kansas finances are in a dire state, a very dire state. Reality is about to smack Kansas Republicans head on, in the pocketbook.
Ah, Yes, the Conservative Cowards and Quitters True ... I Forgot About Those .... I did forget to account for that bloc. How much of that is a calculation that there's only so much damage a Democrat can do over the course of a term fiercely opposed by the legislature, and how much of it is just selfishness? You know, the whole, "Nobody on the ticket is perfect, so, waaaaaah! I'm staying home!" It's the latter that always blows my mind, but you're aware I have an exceptionally unflattering assessment of the averages when it comes to Kansas voters and intelligence. I'll refuse to vote for a Democrat, easily. But it's a lot harder sell to get me to vote Republican. In such cases that the calculation suggests that the bad vs. worse potential will hold at bad, I'll actually spend an ideological vote instead of skipping out. Like 2000; I refused to vote for Al Gore as president. He had gotten my vote, via Bill Clinton, twice for his vice presidency, and given what he did and how he treated my generation during the eighties, that was more than he deserved. So I voted for the nuclear physicist who hangs out with the Maharishi, who ran on the Natural Law Party ticket, of all things. If I thought I absolutely had to vote for Gore in order for him to win my state—ha!—I would have, but no, I won't stay home. Besides, it's a lot harder to be pissed off about the returns, or, such as it sometimes turns out, celebrate them, if you're not part of what they represent. And, well, it looks kind of silly. There are some years I vote just so I can justify complaining about the returns. But it's true, every once in a while you run into an election where it doesn't really matter how you vote insofar as you and everyone else in the jurisdiction will suffer for the result. And those are among the times when staying home just isn't an option.
Well we will see how this works out in a few months. Brownback, like most politicians in this state, has been bought and paid for courtesy of the Koch brothers. Brownback's primary opponent with no name recognition and $9,000 in the bank took 40% of the primary voters.
Republicans in Kansas, with a small government agenda, want to greatly expand government with the healthcare compact. The Republican sponsored healthcare compact would take all Medicare, Medicaid, and other healthcare spending and give it directly to the states who form this compact. For Kansas that equates to some 7 billion dollars. The federal government already funds more than half state expenditures in the state and they think the can spend it better than the feds, though they cannot articulate why in any meaningful way. Hell, they cannot even articulate how the program would work in any meaningful detail. The 7 billion dollars would greatly help the state budget which is in shambles and the huge deficits rung up by the Republican governor. It is more than likely this money, should Republicans get it, would be used to patch holes in their tax schemes rather than spent on Medicare and Medicaid services for Kansas citizens. Our Republican governor is well skilled at avoiding accountability for his actions. http://www.kansas.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/article1328250.html http://www.kansas.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/article1328250.html
