If I am to believe this Politico piece, Republican Governor Sam Brownback’s massive tax cuts have been such an obvious epic fiscal disaster for the state of Kansas that other GOP governors are actually taking notice as if “evidence” has the slightest thing to do with how they arrive at their policies. If so, I guess it would be a welcome development. After all, this is a party that has almost completely forsaken the Scientific Method.
Although income taxes composed almost half of Kansas’ general fund, Brownback said the cuts would grow the economy and attract new business, so that revenue would spring back quickly, essentially paying for the cuts. He had Reagan-era tax guru Arthur Laffer at his back supporting him.
But his plan didn’t pan out. Revenues are way down, and job growth remains below the national average. His own budget director says they may have to stop some of the tax cuts from going into effect, according to a New York Times interview.
Republican tax cutters in other states want to avoid that fate.
If you read the article a little more carefully, you’ll realize that the Republicans still love their tax cuts and wish they could make tax cuts as large as Brownback’s, but they realize that there are some limits on how little revenue they can ask for, despite their remaining allegiance to the magical economic theories of Arthur Laffer.
In other words, it’s not really clear that they’ve internalized that the rhetoric (or, theory, if you want to be overly generous) is complete bullshit. It is possible to set a target for how much revenue you want and then set tax rates accordingly, but it is not possible to just slash taxes way below what you believe you’ll need and then hope for some kind of miracle to occur.
If your goal is to deceptively and without the knowledgable consent of the governed shrink the size of the government down to a size where it can be drowned in the bathtub, then disregarding math and economics can work just fine. But if you actually want your budget to work, it is a prescription for looking like an idiot and ruining the fiscal condition of your state, the country, and the people who live there.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with ideology, but any ideology that is based on illusions and sleights of hand will ultimately crack up on the rocks of reality.
To all thansk
_____
Salina car Dealer
And this past November, after years of a declining state economy, the white people in Kansas looked around, found that they were still – even if only marginally – better off than the N*ggers* in their state, and reelected Brownback.
So, I guess they consent to his policies.
*From “Mississippi Burning:”
“Ward ( Willem Dafoe: Some things are worth dying for.
Anderson (Gene Hackman): Down here, things are different; here, they believe that some things are worth killing for.
Ward: Where does it come from, all this hatred?
Anderson: You know, when I was a little boy, there was an old Negro farmer lived down the road from us, name of Monroe. And he was, uh, – well, I guess he was just a little luckier than my Daddy was. He bought himself a mule. That was a big deal around that town. Now, my Daddy hated that mule, ’cause his friends were always kiddin’ him about oh, they saw Monroe out plowin’ with his new mule, and Monroe was gonna rent another field now they had a mule. And one morning that mule just showed up dead. They poisoned the water. And after that there was never any mention about that mule around my Daddy. It just never came up. So one time, we were drivin’ down the road and we passed Monroe’s place and we saw it was empty. He’d just packed up and left, I guess. Gone up North, or somethin’. I looked over at my Daddy’s face – and I knew he’d done it. And he saw that I knew. He was ashamed. I guess he was ashamed. He looked at me and he said: ‘If you ain’t better than a nigger, son, who are you better than?’…He was an old man just so full of hate that he didn’t know that bein’ poor was what was killin’ him.”
Yes, an ideology like that will eventually crack up on the rocks of reality. Unfortunately, a lot of innocent passengers on that ship will pay a big price, including not surviving either voyage or the crack up. A lot, not enough but a lot, of voters of Kansas and other states (watch Wisconsin sink) did not vote for that ideology, and some of those who did weren’t really aware of what they were voting for.
I don’t have much sympathy for the later. If you are too stupid or lazy or busy to bother to learn about what you’re voting for maybe you earned what you got. Or maybe you shouldn’t vote.
If your goal is to deceptively and without the knowledgable consent of the governed shrink the size of the government down to a size where it can be drowned in the bathtub, then disregarding math and economics can work just fine. But if you actually want your budget to work, it is a prescription for looking like an idiot and ruining the fiscal condition of your state, the country, and the people who live there.
The eternal question: does Sam Brownback or [Insert Republican Politician Here] believe in magic (Ronald Reagan) or in tax cutting as a means of destroying government (David Stockman)?
While Stockman hates government programs, I’m pretty sure he has repudiated Reaganomics and Lafferism.
Agreed. I was referring to his 1981 interview with William Greider, which contains these gems:
Stockman himself had been a late convert to supply-side theology, and now he was beginning to leave the church. The theory of “expectations” wasn’t working. He could see that. And Stockman’s institutional role as budget director forced him to look constantly at aspects of the political economy that the other supply-siders tended to dismiss. Whatever the reason, Stockman was creating some distance between himself and the supply-side purists; eventually, he would become the target of their nasty barbs. For his part, Stockman began to disparage the grand theory as a kind of convenient illusion–new rhetoric to cover old Republican doctrine.
“The hard part of the supply-side tax cut is dropping the top rate from 70 to 50 percent–the rest of it is a secondary matter,” Stockman explained. “The original argument was that the top bracket was too high, and that’s having the most devastating effect on the economy. Then, the general argument was that, in order to make this palatable as a political matter, you had to bring down all the brackets. But, I mean, Kemp-Roth was always a Trojan horse to bring down the top rate.”
[snip]
But Stockman was buoyant about the political implications of the tax legislation: first, because it put a tightening noose around the size of the government; second, because it gave millions of middle-class voters tangible relief from inflation, even if the stimulative effects on the economy were mild or delayed. Stockman imagined the tax cutting as perhaps the beginning of a large-scale realignment of political loyalties, away from old-line liberalism and toward Reaganism.
I don’t really see this fiscal crisis playing out from my perch in the Kansas suburbs of Kansas City. I would prefer to let this play out for another few years rather than raise taxes. Let’s cut some more government services (it is Kansas after all) and see what happens. Trust me on this point… the people of Kansas are really not worthy of your concern. I have a good job and will be fine either way. If I lose my job, I will move away as quickly as possible so there is little reason for me to invest in this horrid state.
I was 19 when I figured this out about Missouri.
“There’s nothing inherently wrong with ideology, but any ideology that is based on illusions and sleights of hand will ultimately crack up on the rocks of reality.”
WOW, with this one line you just described the future of the GOP party. I wonder if anyone of their members will recognize the truth in what you said above.
And all religion.
Has Laffer weighed in on why the tax cuts didn’t produce any increase in state income? Maybe the tax cuts were enacted during the wrong phase of the moon or something…
Even the goddamn Laffer curve doesn’t show that government revenues are inversely proportional to tax rates. If you raise tax rates from, say, 0% to 5%, revenues really do go up. Laffer’s arguments make some sense when taxes are ridiculously high, but only then.
But of course to an ideologue taxes are always ridiculously high no matter what the actual rates are. So there you go.
The very interesting thing about conservative governance is that amidst all of the tax cutting and spending cutting (especially of funds perceived as going to Democratic constituencies) what generally happens is corruption in the state capital runs rampant. For every dollar saved by spending cuts, two to five dollars are wasted by one-off “public-private partnerships” and “economic development activity”. And those involve the government officials in all sorts of junkets and gratuitous goodies.
And the people keep voting the same crooks in because they expect that they will eventually cut that wasteful spending too. But noooo. The roads don’t get paved, but they get contracted to someone who reaps a windfall in charging the public more tolls than they would ever pay in taxes. But the new plant that pays minimum wage gets state-paid interchange with the interstate and state purchase of the land and no guarantees of repayment should the corporation move operations elsewhere. But the governor got a nice vacation and a game of golf.
Let’s stop deluding ourselves that we are talking about ideology here, despite the claims of conservative philosophy.
The appeal is this simple logic. If we cut off the taxes, the politicians will have nothing to steal. There’s where the sleight of hand comes in; just look at elected officials salaries after the tax-cutters come to power.
It is a plain out flim-flam–no ideology to it. No belief except the belief in outsmarting the rubes. Watch the weird little smiles conservative politicians get when they speak, especially the supposed “dumb” ones. They’re having fun seeing how long they can run the act. Some of them have visions of running through two terms of the Presidency; after all look at the Gipper and W.
It’s time for us to stop believing that it has anything at all to do with policy beyond where the money is directed. And how to keep in a position to direct the money.
Politics has come to that fundamentally cynical point with not side benefits. They can’t even make the trains run on time, because no trains. At least Poland has fast trains now.
This illustrates the perfect dichomtomy between what is at least an attempt at some sort of evidence based policy and what is nothing more than faith based policy. Quintessentially, the GOP in Kansas, and shortly in other states, is using this method for the implementation of their economic policies.
Saw that cartoon thirty-five years ago at U of Md. Glad to see it again.
A companion cartoon had two men in white lab coats. The one holding a clipboard said, “I think we have proven conclusively that white rats get sick a lot.”
I just have a few minutes…
Most people are not aware that the Great Depression was actually two almost separate depressions. We all know about the Crash of 1929 causing the start of the Great Depression.
Hoover was only 7 months in office then, and he had 43 months in office to solve it. ALL of his efforts – based on the same old conservative free market crap we’ve heard for decades – FAILED. One of those was “balancing the budget” by LOWERING taxes. Only when FDR expanded the economy with the New Deal programs did the economy start to pull out of the toilet. To pass those, FDR had to really push on conservatives, because he thought if the Depression lasted longer there would be violent revolution, and they bought into that.
But later, when the economy was nearly recovered, the election of 1936 was coming up, and they convinced FDR that their principles would work after all. So, after the election FDR – even with a much expanded Democratic majority in Congress – decided to balance the budget (which had not quite recovered). This balancing act drove the economy into a tailspin for a second time, all but as deep as the first one.
THIS is the Depression that the War fixed, not the first Depression. Most people think it was one big, long depression, but it wasn’t. It was the Balanced Budget Depression (my term) that carried up until the massive government spending on the war fixed.
Government is PART of the economy, and it needs to spend at some level to energize the economy – especially when the rest of the economy is slowing down. THAT is the part that the Repugs simply will not accept – that government spending is GOOD for the economy. All they see is taxes coming out of their pockets, and they think since it is negative for THEM individually that that means it is bad for the economy.
The OTHER side of the government coin is that spending o infrastructure is almost always good. Infrastructure helps industry, in many ways, to make goods and services flow more easily. Easy production and flow of goods and services is paramount for any economy – no matter what some econ textbooks might tell us. Infrastructure is what makes some states backward and some states inherently prosperous. Low tax states = sheit infrastructure states, almost without exception. Low tax countries are at a big handicap because those low taxes mean bad infrastructure. Kansas doesn’t depend on infrastructure expenses too much, because their industrial centers mostly ship east from far eastern Kansas cities – meaning Missouri roads carry most of Kansas’ goods. This misleads Kansans into thinking that they don’t need taxes and infrastructure – and that translates in their brains to low taxes for everything is a good thing.
This splendid accent table lamp features a solid wooden base and a linen shade, making it a great piece standing out among so many table lamps. A wonderful table lamp that light up your space while ornament your home.[ul]http://www.parrotuncle.com/modern-learning-table-light-fixture-for-bedroom-2lbmt-pw.html[/ul]
Let me know if you can ever get a Republican to say what an appropriate level of taxation would be – the point beyond which no more cuts would be necessary rom their POV.