If the United States is better off than North Korea, it’s because Obama and his underlings do a better job than Kim Jong-un and his underlings. If the United States has lower unemployment and stronger economic growth than France, it’s at least partially because Obama and his underlings do a better job than Francois Hollande and his underlings. I’m not a huge fan of Obama, but I would readily agree that there are many governments around the world which are lot worse than his administration.
Nothing that I’ve said in this thread was intended as a joke.
I don’t see why I should care about what states are the best “peers” of Kansas. My point is straightforward. Compared to the national average, Kansas is better, as measured by economic growth, unemployment rate, income inequality, and poverty.
Yet liberal sources such as the New York Times, Salon, and Slate pour out articles trying to convince us that Kansas has become a disaster area. They focus on the relatively few areas where Kansas is slightly below the national average, and make no mention of the areas where Kansas outperforms the national average. Of course if we start comparing the growth rates, poverty rates, and unemployment rates of Kansas to high-tax liberal havens such as New York or Maryland, the result is quite embarrassing for tax-and-spend liberals.
So in response, they insist that we not compare Kansas to the rest of the country, but only to states that they’ve cherry-picked. But why should we? The only argument the tax-and-spend crowd has to offer is that Kansas’ growth is slightly slower than Nebraska’s or Oklahoma’s or a few other states. Okay, well overall taxes in Kansas are slightly higher than in those states. Perhaps Kansas should cut taxes some more.
Kansas, historically, has had lower rates of poverty and unemployment and so on than the nation as a whole, so the fact that it still does tells you nothing about the Brownback experiment.
Kansas, historically, has had rates in each of these areas comparable to those of the surrounding states, because Kansas has historically faced very similar economic conditions as those other states. Today, in most of these areas, Kansas is falling behind our peer states.
Brownback’s great experiment was supposed to jumpstart the state: “like shooting adrenaline into the heart.” The patient isn’t doing so well right now, and Wall Street is downgrading the state’s bond rating because the financial types see the state falling further behind. Job creation is well below the national average now: with fewer jobs, and higher taxes on the poor (which you omit to discuss), poverty will be rising over the coming months and years. The governor has been drawing down reserves and special funds (the highway fund has been raided to the tune of many tens of millions) just to keep the state government from being unable to pay its bills; that’s not a sustainable practice, but the budget picture is grim this year and worse next year.
Kansas taxes on income from “small business” (broadly defined) are already ZERO. He eliminated them. You can’t cut them anymore. This was part of that shot of adrenaline in the heart; it was a shot in the heart all right, but of lead.
School funding is already so bad it’s been declared unconstitutional, and with the current budget outlook, the state is going to have to cut hundreds of millions of dollars more from the education budget. Without a well-educated workforce, how can good jobs be created here?
So given the state of the State of Kansas when Brownback took over, was his economic plan the right thing to do?
In the same way that scrubbing your face with a Brillo pad is a good treatment for acne.
slash2k: I’m glad you acknowledge that Kansas has lower rates of unemployment and poverty than the national average. (I’m not holding my breath waiting for Thomas Frank and Paul Krugman to draw their readers’ attention to that fact.) I think it’s understandable that when the Kansas voters were given a chance to shift their state government towards the high tax, high unemployment, high poverty policies of many states governed by Democrats, they chose not to.
Regarding education spending, I already noted in my OP that there have been budget cuts to education. Is there any evidence that this is actually making students in Kansas less intelligent or less prepared to enter the workforce? Perhaps there is, but none of the liberal rants against Brownback that I’ve read have included any.
Oh, OK, so its perfectly sound economic theory, and its working splendidly? Or its utter hogwash and it just isn’t going as badly as it might? Or, as it will.
The OP has the germ of a point, in that the situation in Kansas is often phrased far too broadly, or theatrically, by the left. Kansas is not falling apart, or “in the dumper.” Just because they’re running a budget deficit does not mean that everything in the state is fucked: some things are going well, and some things that are going poorly are doing so for entirely unrelated reasons. The U.S. federal government has seen it’s debt and deficit explode over the last 35 years, but I take it we’d all agree that life here has not been an unremitting disaster in that time. A high quality of life, and even economic prosperity, can co-exist with deficits and budget cuts.
That said, the OP’s insistence that everything is just fine is silly. Are the tax cuts the primary cause of the budget shortfall? Yes; I’ve seen no one credibly claim otherwise. Is the shortfall a bad thing? Yes; it’s expensive to borrow money, it’s about to get more expensive now that the bond rating has been dropped, and government services are going to have to be curtailed to the detriment of everyone. Have the tax cuts led to the promised economic prosperity? No, it doesn’t look like it; things could still change, but the early returns are very discouraging, and things are actually about to get worse once the effect of the budgetary cuts on the economy is felt.
The tax cuts are not a “disaster” in absolute, human terms, and we should take care not to overstate things. But they are, so far, a disaster in practical terms, within the scope that the state government’s tax policy can have over the short term. This looks like shitty policy, driven by ideology to the exclusion of pragmatism and analysis.
While I understand that when the voters were presented with GOP smear ads in the last weeks where the GOP bought 53% of the TV ads while the Dems only bought 46% of the TV ads, your claim that “the people of Kansas” made any genuine decision about the direction of government is silly, especially when the vote totals were 50% - 46% - 4%. You try to make it sound like a mandate for Brownback while it looks more like they really could not make up their minds.
Except that wasn’t the choice. Kansans were given the option to shift back to the moderate tax, low unemployment, low poverty, balanced budget policies the state has enjoyed for many years under moderate Republican and moderate Democratic administrations alike. THAT was what was rejected.
And you still have not addressed the point that for lower- to moderate-income Kansans, taxes did not go down. The Brownback tax cuts have been directed at upper-income households; the elimination of the food sales tax refund, e.g., means that many poorer families are paying more in taxes under Brownback than under Sebelius or Graves, even as good job opportunities dry up and poverty increases. In other words, for poor Kansans, Brownback is implementing the “high tax, high unemployment, high poverty policies” you seem to decry.
Kansas students’ test scores are already declining. After a decade of improvements, scores on both reading and math tests are headed down. The 2013 assessments showed reading proficiency declined from 87 to 84.7 percent of the students, while for math 78.3 percent of the students were proficient, compared to 85 percent in 2012. (Because of massive technical problems, the state won’t release the 2014 results, so it will be another year before we have more data.)
Ones with similar economic profiles. Namely in the area of % of economy linked to manufacturing and % of economy linked to services (the two biggest by far in making up the Kansan economy), States with dramatically lower percentages of either (in favor of say % related to natural resources extraction and % to agriculture or % to tourism) represent very different economies.
I’d also argue if we want to do data over meaningful periods of time, say ~30 years, it’d be useful to compare the age of Kansas population, population growth rate, its gdp per capita inflation adjusted over time versus its peers etc.
It’s possible some of its neighbors may be peers economically, but we know that at least a few of them are poor comparison points, Oklahoma in particular is one of the biggest beneficiaries of the shale gas revolution.
There are a lot of more valid comparisons to Kansas than just its immediate neighbors. A few I could think of:
-Compare Kansas to other States that have performed similarly economically, as you can then potentially compare causes
-Compare Kansas to all other States collectively, even this large aggregation of diverse States makes more sense than cherry picking just a few States to make some contrived argument.
Kansan spending per pupil in 2014 is the highest ever. You’re talking about State government transfers to local school boards per pupil, which isn’t the same thing as school spending.
The base state aid per pupil is also a figure you’re taking out of context. A more useful one is this:
State General Fund Education Appropriations:
2015: $3.18bn
2014: $2.98bn
2013: $3.10bn
2012: $3.07bn
2011: $2.97bn
2010: $2.70bn
2009: $3.14bn
Again, 2015 is the highest ever.
In 2015 total funding for Kansas K-12 education topped in at just over $6bn, with the little over $3bn mentioned above coming from the State General Revenue Fund, $1.4m from other State aid and Federal Aid, and $1.49bn coming from local revenue (like almost all States, education funding in Kansas is shared between the State governments and local governments, in addition to Federal aid.)
That’s interesting, but the Kansas Department of Commerce says that Agriculture, Forestry & Fishing make up 4.8% of Kansas GDP, manufacturing is 15.93%. In what way the Department of Agriculture (whose bureaucrats have a bias toward making agriculture seem more important than it may really be, I might add) has extrapolated that a sector three times as large a portion of Kansas’s economy somehow “accounts for 37% of the State’s economy”, and what they mean when they say that, is puzzling to me.
CLASSROOM spending, money actually spent on teachers and students, books and curriculum, has declined. See Has Kansas classroom funding gone up or down? Gov. candidates use different definitions | PBS News for how Brownback and his opponents use different definitions.
One big item is funding for the state pension system. The system (called KPERS) is significantly underfunded, and over the past several years the state has had to put a lot more money into KPERS to shore it up. Brownback counts that as “education spending,” but it’s not going to current students; in fact, much of the money will end up paying people who are not currently teaching in Kansas schools either, so what’s the rationale for counting it as education monies?
The numbers you quote includes the pension money and other funds that will not impact current students. Once you look at classroom spending (and adjust for inflation), Kansas is spending hundreds of thousands less now than five years ago.
Look at the numbers you yourself quote on total state appropriations: $3.14bn in 2009 and $3.18bn in 2015. (That’s assuming the 2015 appropriation stands; K-12 education makes up over half of the state budget, and the state will have to cut a couple hundred million bucks to balance the books on 2015.)
Now, consider that the number of students has increased, we’ve had (admittedly modest) inflation, and the KPERS pass-through has increased by over a hundred million. Adjust for those factors, and school districts have less money to spend on actual education than they did five years ago.
And the figures on agriculture in the Kansas economy incorporate the jobs and GDP generated by agribusiness: meatpacking, grain milling, manufacture of agricultural implements, bioscience, and all of the transportation and trade jobs centered around moving agricultural products. No farm makes the list of the state’s biggest employers, but three meatpackers do, because this state has about twice as many cattle as people. Without the cattle, though, the “manufacturing” jobs in the packing plants would not be here.
Ok, so what states are these?
Look on the bright side OP, you’ve found a way to make liberals care about deficits.
Liberals are the only ones who have cared about deficits in my lifetime. Republicans talk about them, and promise that their policies will bring them down, but it doesn’t actually happen.
We think the time deficits should be reduced are in times of prosperity not in times of recession or sluggish growth.
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/kansas-governor-seeks-tax-increases-221839354.html
Well lookie here. Governor Brownback just asked the legislature for massive tax increases to make up for a huge budget shortfall. Is anyone other than ITR Champion surprised?
Any comments from the OP?
