Story. They apparently have had enough of Gov. Brownback’s stupidity and his “real live experiment” in Republican voodoo economics, and have overridden his veto of a tax bill. The bill was introduced because Brownback has basically driven the state into penury by slashing taxes to the bone. A real live experiment in fucking over everyone you’re supposed to be serving. And yet he and others still insist that it’s working. :rolleyes:
Here’s the link where Doper Republicans confidently explain how these tax cuts were going to be great for Kansas.
And meanwhile, Trump and the Republicans in Congress are attempting the same thing that got Kansas into trouble, including reduction of taxes for pass-through entities (see here for more details on that particular cut).
But I’m sure it will work just peachy at the national level. :rolleyes:
I added a post to that thread this morning when I first saw the story. Thus far, no one has commented in that thread.
Well, as I argued elsewhere today, the Kansas experiment relied on a fundamental flaw in the Republican plan, which is the same thing that happens every time they try this going back to Reagan.
Cut taxes on assumption of n% growth will actually increase revenues.
Cut expenses only to match projections.
Watch projections turn out to be pure fantasy.
Every. Damned. Time.
My suggestion instead would be to figure out what kind of spending cuts you can make first, and then cut taxes to that level with no assumptions beyond normally forecast growth. Then if your projections turn out to be true, you run a surplus and can either pay off debt or rejigger the tax rates. If your projections were shit, you run a balanced budget.
Unless the economy goes sour, in which case you’re in the shit now because you slashed both spending and taxes in a time when revenue is likely to take a dive.
And for the Christian Republicans, I’d say it is because you also didn’t listen to what the bible said about good stewardship with that whole Joseph and the dreams of Pharoah stuff, or you’d have recognized that running a surplus in good times allows you to cover shortfalls in bad times.
Every once in a while I get to talking with “observant” (or so they claim) Christians, and I ask them things about the Old Testament to see how much they know about it. I’m always astonished at how little they usually know. They typically know, for example, some vague thing about Moses leading the Jewish slaves out of Egypt or Noah and the flood, and of some version of the Creation story and that’s about it. Oh, and they might know a lot of cherry-picked messianic quotes from the Prophets.
But know the story of Joseph’s life? Beyond something about a colorful garment he had (maybe), not so much.
The difference between states and the fed is that the fed can/does run deficits; huge ones. States are balanced budget entities.
Enough panic can drive Republicans to action.
It’s not a Dem or Repub problem at the Federal level. The Dems were equally complicent with Reagan in the whole, “deficits are good - trickle down economics” farce during the 80s. As long as the Dems got their constituent earmarks, they were all in.
From David Stockman, OMB for Reagan in Wiki:
“Stockman was quoted as referring to Reagan’s tax act in these terms: “I mean, Kemp-Roth [Reagan’s 1981 tax cut] was always a Trojan horse to bring down the top rate… It’s kind of hard to sell ‘trickle down.’ So the supply-side formula was the only way to get a tax policy that was really ‘trickle down.’ Supply-side is ‘trickle-down’ theory.”[7] Of the budget process during his first year on the job, Stockman was quoted as saying, “None of us really understands what’s going on with all these numbers,” which was used as the subtitle of the article.[7]”
I disagree, they caved to political realities. It’s the opposite of growing balls.
When you see them admitting that bankrupting the government might be a bad idea, I’ll think differently.
Do they have sources for academic cred? What University has an economics department than can be relied upon to produce scholarly blather about the sound reasoning supporting “supply side” economics? Someplace where they consider Mr. Keynes a wild-eyed radical?
I’ve read about Kansas as a bold experiment in conservative theory, but was that really it? They offered up the whole state of Kansas just to try it out? Maybe then bright young post-grad students would be writing papers on the wonderful experiment in governance?
Its dead, Jim. Jim, this theory is dead. Its rung down the curtain and joined the Choir Invisible…
It’s worse. It’s an undead. We will hear they weren’t wrong, it’s just that Kansas conservatives are really RINOS and that the government was insufficiently committed to cutting spending.
I’ve already heard that today. That they didn’t cut taxes enough, that they didn’t cut spending anywhere near where they should have. :smack:
Have also heard ‘rino’ thrown around a lot too.
It’s fascinating the lengths that people will go to, to try to discredit conservative viewpoints. Everybody is blaming Kansas’ low tax rates for the state’s problems. I can assure you that that’s not the reason.
From the article in the OP:
Compare that to Colorado. In 1998, our state tax was a flat rate 5%. It’s gradually been cut over the years, and is now 4.63%. Furthermore, we have TABOR, which means (among other things) that if state revenue goes over a certain amount, the state must either simply refund the excess, or else ask permission to keep it. (As a matter of fact, the main reason that the tax rate has been cut was to reduce the number of years in which the state would collect more money than it was allowed to keep.)
And yet – according to the BLS, Colorado currently has the lowest unemployment rate in the nation.
https://www.bls.gov/web/laus/laumstrk.htm
So whatever the reason for Kansas’ troubles, it isn’t the tax rate.
The state of Washington, by contrast, has 0.0% income tax (like 6 other states, including Texas), but the sales tax is fairly high (but exempting most food). However, like Colorado, Washington imposes a specific tax burden on businesses (not to mention the buckets of revenue generated from legal marijuana sales). Brownback’s tax cuts greatly reduced the state’s revenue drawn from businesses. That appears to be a key difference in the tax structure between these states: the states that tax businesses more seem to do better. There are, of course, other differences. It is a complex picture.
It’s not growing a pair of balls; it’s called “People have the freedom to believe in whatever bullshit they want but they don’t have the freedom from the consequences of their mythology.”
Republican bullshit is exposed. All Democrats have to do now is say, “Oh yeah? Kansas!”
Of course a Trumpist will just call it “fake news” and say they didn’t go far enough. “Kansas should have eliminated taxes!”
Yep, fully expected. The real problem is that budget problems are, to a large degree, an abstraction in the minds of idiotic right wing voters. If you say the schools and roads aren’t being funded, they’ll just snap back and say “Privatization!”
Americans went through this in the early 1900s when wealth and income inequality were on the rise (as they are now). In spite of repeated banking panics in 1907 and periodically after that until about 1928 or 1929, the right wing economic propaganda continued to be politically successful - or at least not politically harmful. What changed everyone’s thinking? The worst economic crisis in our nation’s history (outside of the periods following the Revolution and Civil War).
So I suppose that’s where we’re headed. We need to have a full-on economic crisis in which 50-75% of the population is living in economic distress before we finally give up believing in the economic fairy tale of conservative economics.
Politicians grow concerned that their opportunities for grift and vote-purchasing are dwindling along with tax revenue, raise taxes to pay for threatened schemes. Extra. Extra. Read all about it.
The political reality in Kansas is spelled Koch. They have likely annoyed those libertarian assholes by passing a tax bill against their wishes, which means there will be well-financed campaigns against many of them next time around. It had to take a certain amount of sack to give the Kochs the finger.
Well no, people are blaming Kansas’ severe unsustainable tax cuts for the state’s problems. Or rather, they are blaming Brownback and his gang of supply-siders for wrongly and disingenuously hawking severe unsustainable tax cuts as viable solutions to the state’s problems.
Nobody is claiming that a low tax rate in itself is necessarily a bad thing, depending on how it works out in available revenues. Fortunately for you, there are enough extremely well-heeled folks in Colorado that a flat tax of 4.63% of all federal taxable income across the board results in a fairly hefty chunk of revenue.
But that wasn’t the situation that Brownback and his merry men had to deal with, and they were ideology-blinded idiots for believing that deep tax cuts would be an automatic panacea for the ills of the situation they did have to deal with.
When you start with what you want the projections to tell you and then work backwards, it’s amazing how often the projections turn out to be wrong.
Like the projections I kept hearing six or seven years ago that Obama was going to ruin the economy?