Live from Heirloom Hearth and Bakery: The Kansas Republican Party's omerta is holding in at least one dimension: nobody is admitting whether they understood the magnitude by which Brownback and his acolytes were conning the legislature, or whether they are themselves among the victims of the con.
The good citizens and politicians of Johnson County, KS are holding themselves harmless in this ongoing public-finance disaster via social democracy in one county. The net effect thus appears to be a substantial redistribution of wealth to Johnson County (and to the rich of Wichita) via income-tax cuts and away from the rest of Kansas, with the redistributional leak being about 2/3: the value of the extra private income to Overland Park looks to me to be about 1/3 the harm done by cutting back public services that have a very high benefit-cost ratio elsewhere in Kansas.
In the long-run this may be bad even for Johnson County's upper middle class. Spring and Cerner have global reach in their sales--and they employ 45,000 people in Greater Kansas City via exports, and so enable some 600,000 people to live relatively well for the southwestern Midwest in Greater Kansas City. But to support Greater Kansas City's 2,000,000 requires another 100,000 export jobs as well, half of them to the mixed Missouri terrain to the east and half of them to the Kansas prairie to the west.
And if the Kansas prairies lose the skills and the population to themselves make a good living, the money to pay for trips to Nebraska Furniture Mart, procedures at KU Med, and Chiefs tickets will vanish:
: Sam Brownback’s Kansas Disaster is Getting Even Worse: "Reasonable people can come to different moral value judgments...
...But it’s important to remember that it’s not just about empathy and ethics. It’s about what works and what doesn’t. And every day in every way, we are learning that conservative approaches simply don’t work.... Exhibit A in the utter failure of conservative dogma is Sam Brownback’s trainwreck in Kansas... Yael Abouhalkah....
This has been a bad week for Gov. Sam Brownback and others who believe his massive income tax cuts are going to dramatically boost employment in the state. A new report Friday showed that Kansas had lost a whopping 4,300 jobs in July from a month earlier.... Kansas has added a puny 5,600 total jobs in the last year — from July 2014 to July 2015. The new information shows that the tax cuts that have drained the Kansas treasury of hundreds of millions of dollars the past two years are not working to attract employers and jobs...
Kansas’ atrocious performance has nothing to do with the state of the midwest or the manufacturing sector generally, because both manufacturing and Kansas’ neighbors are actually doing pretty well comparatively.... All this as Brownback’s tax cuts are destroying what remains of the state’s educational system and social services. Brownback and his allies suffer under the delusion that supply-side economics really works, and that if they cut taxes enough on rich people and businesses that there will be an explosion of jobs and economic growth. That’s not just immoral because it increases inequality and hurts the poor. It’s as wrong as 2+2=5. In all but the most extreme cases, cutting taxes on the rich does nothing to create jobs, but slashing the salaries of teachers and cutting welfare benefits means less consumer demand, which in turns drives the economy into recession. The immorality would at least be somewhat tolerable if the ideology functioned at a broad utilitarian level, but it doesn’t.
