California vs Kansas economy... why can't we put bad ideas to rest?

What bad idea? That higher taxes ipso facto reduce growth and cause increased stagnation and poverty.

I don’t presume it all ends rosy no matter what, I’m sure California has some natural boosts being a large coastal state with dense urban mega centers for technology and high rolling intelligent people that boost up the states prospects. California is a magnet to such people, but if you listened to some conservatives you’d think none of that mattered, that the general economy was almost PURELY a function of tax rates for income and business… enter Kansas.

But it does not matter

How do you get past this? This is something I’ve pondered about before. Lies, but the most insidious lies of all. The lies of omission. Leaving out critical details intentionally to bolster your own argument or cause. Freakishly hard to prove, it’s hard to know the minds of men, but it is so common and it causes these sorts of clearly incorrect models of causality to not be adjusted and shit canned for the flawed assumptions and ideas that they are. Clearly lower taxes by themselves are NOT the only variable needed for adjustment to improve an economy, maybe they would be if taxes were artificially high, but a blanket assumptions across all tax levels? How do you break through? Why does no one even bother to try? Is it that the people that might are not talking across to others that might never hear the counter narratives? Or do they hear it and just don’t care?

Well, when you achieve the impossible feat of separating the variables and accurately solve how each variable impacts the economy you’ll be able to put the bad ideas to rest.

Because one party is actively convinced that funding the government is a bad idea.

No. Conservatives don’t believe in no government. They believe in constrained government.

You’re already screwing up though by cherry picking California vs. Kansas and using it to prove that conservative fiscal policy is a bad idea and liberal fiscal policy good.

Why not compare Indiana and Illinois instead? Or Utah and New Jersey?

Correct conservative fiscal policy is to maintain low taxes, a low level of services, but a well functioning state economy. The wrong way is to cut taxes huge in an already low tax state. Brownback did it wrong, even most conservatives seem to acknowledge that. When will liberals acknowledge that the “blue model” is a failure most of the time, and that all Jerry Brown did was buy it some time because he’s just a better governor than most and often denied the California legislature’s worst ideas?

Let’s be clear, citing California as an example of the blue model working is absurd. California was near begging for a bailout not too long ago(never gonna happen), and Jerry Brown’s skill bought California some time. yet there’s no indication that California Democrats have learned anything. So then the next recession will come along, California Democrats will act as if this was a totally unforseeable event that totally isn’t their fault, and please can we have a bailout? No.

California’s problems were caused in large part by a tax system that reduced the level of stable property taxes and thus caused greater dependence on less stable income and sales taxes. When the recession hit tax revenues plummeted while the need for state assistance increased.
California’s other problem was a dysfunctional legislature. That was a problem under both Democratic and Republican governors. Once demographics made Republicans irrelevant we’ve had balanced budgets that pass on time. Brown doesn’t veto a lot of big spending bills. We are putting more money in the rainy day fund.
The key was increasing taxes on the richest, which drove so many jobs out of California that cars hardly moving carrying all the unemployed to their non-jobs. And so many people are getting jobs that housing prices have skyrocketed, to the point that housing inventory is low because people selling would have to pay capital gains on some of their profit, it being higher than the federal cutoff. I have that “problem” too.
Recessions will hurt - they always do, and our property tax problem isn’t any better than it was. But we’re in better shape than states that are in trouble during good times. And we did all the stuff that conservatives said would send jobs running to Texas.

A fairly standard liberal argument but one that is flawed, since blue state and local governments have tended to always tax as much as they can and spend as much as they can. If California had had access to higher property taxes it would have already been in the budget.

Then when the next recession comes you’ll behave like a good red state and not go hat in hand to the feds.:slight_smile:

California and Kansas are demographically, geographically, different in so many ways that it would be very difficult to draw real conclusions from it. As the OP alluded to, California also posseses numerous natural resources and advantages that Kansas lacks.

It would be like giving a kangaroo a high dose of Drug X, a guinea pig a low dose of Drug X, and trying to parse conclusions about the drug’s effects from it. Too many variables, and the test subjects themselves are wildly different to begin with.

Taxes tend to be higher in places worth living in and doing business in. They tend to be lower in places less desirable to live in and not as beneficial/supportive/valuable as business locations.

There are anomalies, yes. But moving from one high-tax state to another and listening to endless arguments about how people were going to pack up and move to the paradise of West Buttland made me take note of the basic dichotomy. (They were, of course, moving to Heaven aka one of the Carolinas or West Virginia or whatever after they got their pension or retirement, which wasn’t available there, nor were schools they’d send their kids to, nor were any particular entertainment or cultural highlights… etc.)

The comparisons are not made directly between Kansas and California. The comparisons are made between Kansas 2016 and Kansas 2014, and then between California 2016 and California 2014. The conclusion is that California (which led the nation in 2015 growth at 4.2%) is on a much better trajectory than Kansas (near the bottom at 0.2%).

For a question about economic myths the OP contains alot of them. The cite that says California’s economy is doing great only mentions how fast it is growing, not the baseline. In fact California’s unemployment rate is 46.5% higher than Kansas’s unemployment rate. The only reason California is growing more quickly than most states in terms of jobs is that California did so much worse than the rest of the country during the great recession and thus the return to normalcy is going to involve more jobs being added. Also the cite only mentions numbers of jobs and since California is so much bigger than other states the number of jobs could be bigger while the rate is smaller. For instance the article mentions that Florida added 100,000 fewer jobs than California but does not point out that Florida only has half the population of California and if California added jobs at the same rate as Florida they would have added another 120,000 jobs during the same time period.
Another misconception is that Kansas is a low tax state. It is not now and was not before the tax cut. The total tax burden in Kansas was higher than every neighboring state before the tax cut and is not appreciably different than the other states now. The tax cut in Kansas was relatively small only 2% of income for the top rate. For a high earner the marginal tax rate including local, state, and federal taxes when from around 46% to around 44%. The idea that such a small tax rate change would cause a bonanza is just silly.
No real conservative economist would ever say that tax rates are the only thing that matter to an economy, or that such a small change in taxes would cause an instant boom. If the governor of Kansas actually said that it was because he is a politician and they are prone to huge exaggerations.

I’m sure conservatives will come up with more excuses when Kansas, in the next few years if not now, is thought of in the same way as Mississippi.

The weird thing is that most of the people defending this lie that conservative policies work are the same ones being hurt by it. Their identity is tied up in being victims when they lose, and elites when they win. It never occurs to them to change teams. I mean really, what are they getting out of defending Kansas? A smug sense of satisfaction? Even that’s not worth the poverty and alcoholism and living in a trailer.

If I were in their shoes, I’d rather join the liberals and try to get my cousin marriage annulled and eat some crow than perpetuating the lie that keeps me poor and stupid. I don’t want to look at a book at instantly think that it may have Forbidden Liberal Knowledge. It just has to be tremendously tiring and demoralizing to live like that each and every day, beaten down like a stray dog, with no hope of getting out

Does stereotyping make one more enlightened?

Our gas taxes have not gone up in ages, and are fixed even as the price of gas has gone up. So that is a counterexample. I’m fine with letting people vote on tax increases, btw.

Which is exactly what states should do, since they can’t print money to make up for the money which disappears in a recession. One of the reasons recovery took so long was that states cut back instead of spending, which made the problem worse. Austerity does not work to cure recessions - that should be obvious to all by now.

My point was FAR less ambitious than you made it out to be. My point was that you can’t just point to tax levels in a vacuum as either some intrinsic good or bad, as conservatives do quite often (I listen to far more of them than most people on these boards with talk radio).

A large chunk of them talk as if just setting tax rates lower and streamlining the process is all that is needed to jump start the economy. Kansas should be a clear cut shut out of that belief/dogma. It’s NOT TRUE. But the narrative does not adjust.
The reverse is not true for most liberals with any sense. I do not assume that tax increases will never cut into prosperity, or that higher minimum wage levels in some areas would be a net negative (likely depends on the economic levels of the area, a 15 dollar minimum wage in Los Angeles is a lot more doable than a 15 dollar federal minimum wage in rural Mississippi).

I don’t assume because X government policy lead to bad results that the solution is NO GOVERNMENT POLICY AND TO JUST COMPLETELY REMOVE GOVERNMENT.

That MIGHT be a better solution, or instead of no government policy, you could try ANOTHER government policy that produced better result, like the STATE restriction on lending in Texas that required 20% equity to qualify for a first home mortgage that shielded that housing market from the crash.

Why does no one check these conservative fools? The rigidity and dogma almost always goes unmolested.

What tools does a state have to affect its economy? A state government does not have a separate monetary policy, can not have a separate trade policy, and almost all states have balanced budget amendments. That leaves tax policy and regulatory policy as the two ways most state governments have to change a state’s economy. Yet because of Tiebout competition most states are very limited as to the amount of taxes they can charge and thus limited as to how much they can cut taxes. States are very limited as to what damage or improvements their governments can do.
However some state governments are doing their best to mess things up.
California has the best weather on the continent, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, great ports that face the fastest growing parts of the world, some of the best farmland in the world, and scenic beauty unmatched in the world. Yet despite this they are doing there level best to ruin everything the have going for them. California has an unemployment rate that is 20% higher than the rest of the country, three times the number of food stamp recipients as the next highest state, adjusted for cost of living the highest poverty rate in the country, 20% of the country’s homeless people, and unfunded pension liabilities totaling 300 billion to 1 trillion dollars depending on how it computed. Every year about 1,000 businesses leave California and thousands of people leave the state every year for more business friendly state.
Yet despite all of this evidence some people foolishly claim that California is a model for our country instead of a warning.

No, they believe the only constraints on Governments should be those which fit* their *political & religious beliefs.

Dems= “Tax & Spend”
Repubs= “Borrow and spend” I dont see any constraints there, or last time GWB was the President.

*Current *conservative fiscal policy is to cut taxes on the rich, spend borrowed tax money making their cronies right, increasing the deficit- then blaming it on the Democrat Party.

A fairly standard Conservative argument but one that is flawed, since red state and local governments have tended to always* borrow* as much as they can and spend as much as they can. Get a big deficit and then blame it on the Democrats!

California’s public pension system is better funded than the Kansas version.

When comparing percentage of the population receiving food stamps, California isn’t even in the top tier, having a rate rather below the national average.

California is gaining in population; there are counties in Kansas where the population peaked more than a century ago.