Saturday, June 10th, 2017
Stephan: If you have been reading SR regularly you know that I have been covering "the economic experiment" of Kansas Republican governor Sam Brownback since he was inaugurated. Brownback campaigned on, and was very clear that if elected he was going to put Republican economic theory into practice aided by a Republican legislature. And they did just that.
This matters not only because the states are laboratories to test social policies but, also, because Donald Trump and Paul Ryan are trying to implement basically the same policies for the country as a whole, once again with the assistance of a Republican congress.
Well, the report card is in, and it shows that Republican economics are toxic nonsense that destroy social wellbeing. It has gotten so bad in Kansas that even the Republicans in the state's legislature have had enough. Here's the story, and it is a cautionary tale. Will Ryan and Trump learn for the Kansas disaster? I doubt it.
Kansas Republican Governor Sam Brownback
Thanks to the state of Kansas, we now get to find out whether Republicans are capable of learning from their failures.
On Tuesday, lawmakers in Topeka finally ended their costly misadventure in supply-side economics, when the GOP-dominated Legislature voted by wide margins to override a veto by Gov. Sam Brownback and reverse the massive tax cuts he championed in 2012. Kansas has faced chronic budget deficits and struggled with disappointing job growth during the half-decade since Brownback signed the reductions into law—a grinding fiscal disaster that turned the state into a poster child for conservative policy thinking gone awry and gradually stirred a rebellion among members of the governor’s own party. They were finally spurred to act by a $900 million, two-year shortfall, as well as a Kansas Supreme Court ruling that ordered the state to revamp the spending formula for its
