Sam Brownback guts Kansas even more
WMDs in Iraq, death panels in Obamacare, widespread voter fraud in America, tax cuts that generate increased government revenue—these are all things that today’s soundbite conservative GOP base has fervently believed in which simply do not exist.
Belief in the first two have faded some with time, but in Kansas under Gov. Sam Brownback, the second two are still going strong—even though Kansas is suffering a crippling budget deficit due to the simple fact that, whatever supply-side economics guru Art Laffer may claim, subtraction is not addition.
“Our new pro-growth tax policy will be like a shot of adrenaline into the heart of the Kansas economy,” Brownback promised in 2012, when the tax cuts were first passed.
Brownback’s well-paid tax consultant, the legendary economist Laffer, promised Kansans that the cuts would pay for themselves in supercharged economic growth. At the time, a report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy showed that Laffer had things backward: over the previous decade, economic output per person had grown significantly faster in the nine states levying a “high rate” income tax than it had grown in the nine states with no income tax at all. Without the promised faster growth, there was simply no way that cutting taxes could bring in more revenue, they would only bring in mountains of debt, as Reagan had done nationally when he first took Laffer’s advice in 1981.
As Brownback’s tax-cutting fantasies predictable failed last year, there was a wave of hope that the state might change direction, by voting Brownback out. In March, a report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities warned that “Kansas is a cautionary tale, not a model,” explaining that “As other states recover from the recent recession and turn toward the future, Kansas’ huge tax cuts have left that state’s schools and other public services stuck in the recession, and declining further — a serious threat to the state’s long-term economic vitality.
-more-
http://www.salon.com/2015/06/11/sam_brownback_guts_kansas_even_more_this_is_life_under_americas_worst_republican_governor/
= new reply since forum marked as read
