The Fruits of Voodoo Economics In Kansas

[finehoe]

Income-tax cuts in Kansas championed by Governor Sam Brownback have led to credit downgrades, political turmoil and deepening budget deficits. This week, they'll start forcing schools to close early.

As lawmakers work to erase a projected $800 million budget gap for the fiscal year starting July 1, at least eight school districts that saw their funding cut this year because of a greater-than-projected slide in state tax collections will begin shutting down before the scheduled end of classes. Dozens of others have eliminated or cut programs.

http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-05-04/kansas-schools-close-early-as-brownback-tax-cuts-squeeze-revenue

[JeffreyS]

How can Republicans be this bad at economics?? It just doesn't seem possible that they could still believe tax cuts automatically bring increased revenue and economic activity.

If the equation "Pay the Government less = the Government has more revenue and the Country has more economic activity" were true we would long ago have settled on this utopia of flowers and rainbows.

[spuwho]

Classic case where dogma got ahead of good policy.

[JFman00]

It's the central tenet of their creed that lower taxes are always good. The justifications change based on the context and the weather, but there's no arguing with faith. For whatever reason, Americans (of most political stripes) seem to vote based on ideology and belief rather than outcomes.

[fsquid]

Fire the administrators who do nothing useful, and you'd have enough money left over to give teachers a raise--which they deserve.

How many assistant principals were there when you went to high school? How many now? How many of them add anything useful?

Require athletics and other extracurricular activities to provide more of their own funding. You don't need 10 assistant coaches for a HS football team. You just don't.

[spuwho]

Per Atlantic Magazine:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/06/where-republicans-went-wrong-in-kansas/396398/

Where Republicans Went Wrong in Kansas.

Last Tuesday in Topeka, Governor Sam Brownback of Kansas signed a $15 billion state budget that squeaked through the Republican-dominated Legislature after an unprecedented, 113-day session—more than three weeks longer than the 90 days called for under state law. The governor simultaneously signed a pair of bills that raised $384 million in revenue by hiking the state's sales tax and a host of other levies, including on cigarettes.

"I don't know that anybody's happy about it," Brownback said.

Talk about an understatement. According to various reports from the state capital, several lawmakers cast their votes in tears, one Republican accused the governor's administration of blackmail, and exactly no one thought the plan actually solved the state's longterm budget woes. "Next year will be my 40th year in the Legislature, and I have never seen a session like this one," Anthony Hensley, who leads the Senate's small contingent of Democrats, told me by phone on Friday. "It was completely chaotic and dysfunctional."
All that new revenue, along with about $50 million in spending cuts, was needed to close a deep deficit that had embarrassed its conservative governor and thrown its legislature into a months-long gridlock that resembled, well, Congress. As we wrote in April, the deficit resulted in large part from Brownback's own "real live experiment" in supply-side economics—sharp cuts in income tax rates and a huge exemption for owners of small businesses.

Ask any fiscal expert, and Kansas's budget crisis demanded a reckoning—either with its tax code or its longterm spending structure. But its government wasn't up to it. Aligned with conservatives in the Senate, Brownback steadfastly refused to consider a direct reversal of the original tax plan, insisting that the state continue on its path toward replacing the income tax entirely with consumption taxes. The most he would do was freeze the rates, and the result was a plan that will place an even heavier tax burden on the poor, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. Hensley said that when state and local sales taxes are combined, Kansas will have the highest tax on food in the nation in some areas of the state. Brownback, who had hired the economist Arthur Laffer to help craft his original tax plan, had been touting the state's economic recovery to argue that his fiscal vision was starting to work. But a report released Friday found that Kansas had lost nearly 4,000 jobs in May, trailing both the national trend and neighboring Missouri, which added 6,600 jobs.
Lori McMillan, a tax expert and law professor at Washburn University, told me during the middle of the impasse that Kansas lawmakers seemed "paralyzed" by the crisis and the many unpalatable choices they faced. By the time it was finally over, Brownback appeared—at least to his many critics—to be in denial. As described by theWichita Eagle, the governor refused to acknowledge that he had signed a tax increase.  "Look at the totality of the picture," he said, referring to the far deeper tax cuts he had signed in previous years. "When you look at that, it is a tax cut."

Nobody else saw it that way. "Not only is this a tax increase, it is the largest tax increase in state history," Hensley responded in a statement. When I called up Will Upton, the state-affairs manager for Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform, he described the budget that Brownback signed in almost exactly the same words. Norquist serves as something of an arbiter of tax increases among conservatives, and he's famously said his goal is to shrink government to a size where you can "drown it in a bathtub." The problem in Kansas, Upton said, is that while Brownback had succeeded in shrinking the tax burden, he did little to shrink spending.