What's the matter with Kansas?
by digby
Ideological terrorism, that's what:
In a time of slack economic growth and high unemployment around the country, Kansas lawmakers thought they had the solution: massive tax cuts for the wealthy would lure economic activity and jump-start the state’s economy. But after Gov. Sam Brownback (R) signed $1.1 billion worth of tax cuts into law over the past two years, the state is behind the national average for economic growth.
A new forecast from Kansas’s budget officials projects that “personal income in Kansas will grow more slowly than U.S. personal income in 2014 and 2015,” the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) writes. The projections come from Brownback’s own Division of the Budget, which expects personal income growth of 3.8 percent this year and 4.2 percent next year. The state’s overall economic growth is now projected to fall behind the nation’s after two decades of keeping pace, the think tank adds.
At the same time that Brownback’s promised economic growth is failing to materialize, his critics‘ predictions about the tax cuts are largely coming true. The tax package is starving the state of revenue. With less money coming in, Kansas is cutting public services. The state Supreme Court has ordered lawmakers to restore funding to poor school districts, saying that the spending levels they enacted were so low as to be unconstitutional. But given the state’s revenue problems, the way that the legislature is going about correcting the underfunding problem simplytakes money away from other schools that need it.
It's certainly soothing to think that this, finally, will prove to the zealots that they are completely wrong but I'm afraid that's not going to happen. Since things will likely improve a bit --- or at least not get a whole lot worse --- all the unnecessary suffering will be swept under the rug and they will declare a victory. You know, the inevitable rationalization: "it will all work out in the long run." To which Keyenes famously responded, "in the long run we'll all be dead."
You'd think the big pro-life types would be concerned about ruining the lives and the futures of the people but they've never cared much about the post-born have they?
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