Not What We Were Expecting When We Left the Shenandoah, I Must Say...: Live from The Roasterie CLXXIII: May 13, 2014
After the Civil War (during which he had been perhaps more aggressive in using his powers as U.S. Consul in Tangier to conduct "extraordinary renditions" in arresting Confederate commerce-raiders as pirates than Abraham Lincoln had perhaps wished) my Great-Great-Great Grandfather James DeLong moved himself and his second family--his second wife Lucinda Anderson and their I believe four living children--to Independence, Kansas, halfway between Kansas and what would become Oklahoma City, to farm the prairie.
Ever since then, there have been a bunch of DeLongs in Kansas--now my fourth cousins (my ancestors lighted out for DeKalb County in Illinois, where there is reliable water). That's approaching 150 years now...
Modern Kansas is, I have decided, a very interesting place.
I don't think I have ever seen a state with less state pride: Angelenos and San Franciscans, and Silicon Valleyites and the farmers of the Central Valley and the hippies and ex-hippies of the fogbound North Coast do rub each other raw, sometimes, but everybody I have ever found (except for Victor Davis Hanson) thinks the state as a whole is a wonderful, magical place.
But in Kansas...
Johnson County (Kansas City suburbs) doesn't like Sedgwick County (Wichita)... Sedgwick County (Wichita) doesn't like Logan County... Logan County really doesn't like Wyandotte County (Kansas City semi-urban core)... And Wyandotte County (Kansas City semi-urban core) doesn't like Johnson County (Kansas City suburbs)... And the modal opinion in all four is that the state is going to hell, and it's all the fault of the overprivileged lazy oil-wealthy of Wichita, or the yuppies of Johnson County, or the meth-addled rural moochers of Logan County, or the crack-addled urban moochers of Wyandotte County, or possibly more than one of the above, but most to blame is TOPEKA--the seat of the state government-- which wants to tax our money and spend it on THEM!!!
Oliver Willis: Conservatives Have Free Reign In Kansas. It’s Failing: "In Kansas, Republicans dominate the state government....
...Brownback and his buddies have enacted all manner of conservative economic policy in the state. Cutting taxes, etcetera. What is the result? Guess.... The most recent polling there shows Brownback’s approval rating down to 33%, while he’s slightly behind the Democratic challenger. In Kansas, they can’t (honestly) blame liberals for this. They’ve been given a free hand. They were able to enact whatever they wanted, and it has been a miserable failure at a time when other states--including very blue Democratic states like here in Maryland--have been recovering from the Bush recession.
Why? Because conservative economics doesn’t actually work. It is a faith-based program untethered from reality. The numbers don’t add up and it is destructive to societies. But this won’t deter them. They’ll do it again...
Also see:
Menzie Chinn: State Employment Trends: Does a Low Tax/Right-to-Work/Low Minimum Wage Regime Correlate to Growth: "The generality of the negative correlation between the ALEC-Laffer...
...'Economic Outlook' ranking and economic growth, as measured by the Philadelphia Fed’s coincident index.... Here, without further ado, is the correlation for all fifty states:
If a higher ALEC-Laffer ranking resulted in faster growth, then the points should line up along an upward sloping 45 degree line. This is not what I see...
Notice that Kansas and Wisconsin, ranked 15th and 17th in terms of the ALEC-Laffer 'Economic Outlook Rankings', are doing equally badly relative to US employment growth. In contrast, Minnesota (ranked 46th) is outperforming the United States and those two states.... What about California? It is ranked 47th by ALEC-Laffer, and yet is doing the best in terms of employment amongst the four states. This does not deny the relevance of these indices, but for sure the correlation of the index with performance is not obvious to me.... So, the higher the ranking according to Arthur Laffer, Stephen Moore (currently chief economist of Heritage), and Jonathan Williams, the poorer the employment growth...
Kevin Drum: Conservative Pro-Growth Policies Don't Actually Produce Any Growth: "Michael Hiltzik draws my attention to...
...Menzie Chinn[, who] decided to check out whether conservative pro-growth policies actually led to high growth.... Chinn compared scores on the ALEC-Laffer "Economic Outlook" ranking to actual growth in 2013-14.... Although a high ALEC-Laffer ranking may not stimulate any actual growth, Hiltzik points out that it does correspond to reduced taxes on the wealthy and slashed spending on state services that benefit the poor and working class. In other words, it may not affect growth, but it sure is a good deal for the rich. And that's what counts, isn't it?
Peter Coy: Kansas: Governor Brownback's Lab for Steep Tax and Budget Cuts: "Sam Brownback has been a Tea Partie...
...since before the Tea Party was born. When he became governor of Kansas in 2011, he set about making the state a testing ground for conservative principles, including cutting funding for some public education and the eventual elimination of the state’s income tax. “Our new pro-growth tax policy will be like a shot of adrenaline into the heart of the Kansas economy,” he wrote... “pave the way to the creation of tens of thousands of new jobs, bring tens of thousands of people to Kansas, and help make our state the best place in America to start and grow a small business.” The Kansas experiment attracted the attention of both conservatives and liberals around the country, who saw it as an acid test for the Tea Party agenda....
A little more than a year has passed since the first phase of the Brownback tax cuts went into effect on Jan. 1, 2013, so it’s possible to make a preliminary assessment of their effects. The early verdict: not too good.... The immediate effect has been to blow a hole in the state’s finances without noticeable economic growth....
The state income tax cut that Brownback signed in 2012 was the nation’s biggest, in percentage terms, since the 1990s.... Brownback made his cuts in the face of economic weakness, not strength.... The most authoritative study of the effect of these measures is a January report by the Kansas Legislative Research Department, a nonpartisan arm of the legislature. It found that revenue isn’t keeping up with expenses even after cuts in spending on K-12 schools, colleges, libraries, local health departments, courts, and welfare. If nothing changed, the research department’s numbers show, the state’s general fund would have a shortfall of about $900 million by fiscal year 2019, or 14 percent of expenses that year. The state’s constitution requires a balanced budget, so either taxes will have to go back up or spending will have to come down even more. “The tax cuts don’t pay for themselves,” says Duane Goossen, who served as state budget director under both Republican and Democratic governors. “That just is not happening.”
The budget picture has actually darkened since the release of the research department’s January report. In March, the Kansas Supreme Court ruled that cuts to aid programs that close the gap between rich and poor students violated the state constitution...
Arthur B. Laffer, Stephen Moore, and Jonathan Williams: Rich States, Poor States ALEC-Laffer State Economic Competitiveness Index:
