Of All the Many Dorky Things About the Kansas Republican Party, the Dorkiest Is the Pretense that Brownback's Economic Strategy Worked: Live from Teh Roasterie
...thanks to the disastrous consequences of his deep tax cuts, the Wall Street Journal has published an apologia for Brownback.... You know you’re in for a real doozy when Allysia Finley, a member of the Journal’s editorial board and the piece’s author, begins by comparing Brownback’s tax cuts with the 19th-century struggle against slavery. “During the 1850s,” Finley writes “Kansas turned into a battleground for a proxy war between abolitionists and slavery supporters. Today, Kansas has become the flash point in another national debate, this one over government’s role in promoting growth.” Well then. Unlike Brownback, whose theory is that his policies will soon start working )any day now!) but the liberal media is determined to create the impression that they’ve already failed, Finley assures us that Kansas’ tax cuts are working right now...
She omits that Kansas collected $330 million less than expected in revenue for fiscal year 2014, which was $700 million below revenue for fiscal 2013... 10 percent short of expectations. But Finley simply asserts that any budgetary problems can safely be laid at the feet of moderate Republicans in the Kansas Senate.... Finley doesn’t see fit to mention... that state funding for public schools remains 15 percent below pre-Great Recession levels....
And what of the flourishing economy Brownback promised his tax cuts would create? “Since the tax cuts took effect in January 2013,” Finley writes, “private job growth in Kansas has surpassed growth in Nebraska and Iowa after trailing for the prior decade. Services (i.e., small businesses) account for 95% of the state’s growth in private jobs, compared with about 70% in Iowa and Nebraska.” Sounds pretty impressive--until you realize Kansas’ GDP growth of 1.9 percent in 2013 lagged seven neighboring or Great Plains states; the only state in the region to fare worse was Missouri....
.By any objective measure, then, Brownback’s tax cuts have been an utter failure. So what explains the disinformation campaign waged by Brownback’s supporters in the GOP and on the Wall Street Journal editorial board?...
...and the state is in for new fiscal pain... big numbers in a state that spends about $6 billion annually from its general fund.... In June, state lawmakers debated whether the revenue shortfall was temporary. Steve Stotts, the director of taxation at the state’s department of revenue, attributed the shortfall mostly to a one-time event unrelated to Kansas’ tax cuts.... Mr. Stotts said he suspected the state’s revenue-estimating group would cut the state’s revenue projections shortly after the election, at its next scheduled meeting. ‘I can’t tell you how much,’ he said. I can make an educated guess, though: If personal income tax revenues continue to fall short by 10 percent, that will add $250 million to the state’s budget gap.... There could be even bigger problems to come, because Kansas’ income tax estimates for the next nine months are actually more optimistic than this summer’s were.... In 2012, Gov. Brownback called his state’s tax cuts a ‘real live experiment’ in how tax-cutting affects the budget and the economy. So far, the main result of the experiment seems to be that cutting taxes causes the government to lose revenue.
