As The Kansas Economy Dies, Trump Appoints Gov. Sa

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As The Kansas Economy Dies, Trump Appoints Gov. Sam Brownback As Advisor



By Rmuse on Sun, Aug 21st, 2016 at 10:27 pm

In a normal political environment, a national candidate seeking a model of what their proposed policies would produce would certainly choose a winner. However, this is no more a normal political environment than an elephant is quantum-sized, and the state of Kansas is no more an economic winner than Donald Trump is a quiet and thoughtful deep thinker.

In a normal political environment, a national candidate seeking a model of what their proposed policies would produce would certainly choose a winner. However, this is no more a normal political environment than an elephant is quantum-sized, and the state of Kansas is no more an economic winner than Donald Trump is a quiet and thoughtful deep thinker.

This column has spent a fair number of words over the past couple of years defaming Kansas Governor Sam Brownback for the damage he’s wrought on the ignoramus Kansas residents that keep voting for him.

Brownback has inflicted such an incredible amount of economic devastation on the state due to his adherence and allegiance to the Ronald Reagan-era disaster known as ‘trickle down’ economics, that even George W. Bush’s Commerce Secretary said he is terrified of what a Trump economy would do to the country and is happily voting for Hillary Clinton.

Brownback boasted that as governor, he would prove once and for all that if the Republican economic agenda was fully implemented in Kansas, the entire nation would see what truly glorious prosperity would look like.

Thus far, Brownback’s glorious experiment looks like massive debt, credit downgrades, hospital closures, drastically underfunded schools, massive healthcare cuts, raided budgets, perpetual revenue shortfalls, and as reported this week, massive job losses.

Most Americans comprehend that in Republicans’ minds, closing schools, hospitals, allowing roads to deteriorate, and massive debt is not a bad thing, and they justify those atrocities as necessary sacrifices to develop a job-creating Utopia.

In fact, Governor Sam Brownback pledged to Kansas residents that his brilliant ‘trickle down’ scheme would create at a minimum 2,000 jobs a month; and that was just the start.

Well this week it was revealed that not only has Kansas not created 2,000 jobs each month, the jobs losses in Kansas are increasing each month. And stunningly, Donald Trump is telling audiences across the nation that when he is president he will bless the entire country with “the Kansas solution;” all in spite of the growing data that Kansas economy is in its death throes.

Some of the statistics that inspired Trump to tap Sam Brownback as one of his most trusted “key advisors” on economic, agriculture and trade policy are:

In July the unemployment rate kept up its steady rise and grew by 1.3 percent in June. In the past 12 months Kansas lost 4,500 existing jobs. The Kansas economic growth rate over that same period came in at a minus 0.3 percent.

Add to those disasters the revenue shortfall in May and June totaled over $109 million on top of the $45 million already lost in fiscal 2016. These are the results Republicans claim they want the whole nation to experience and Trump will aid is making it happen at the federal level if he is elected president.

One might think Republicans would, if not shy away from, pretend Kansas doesn’t exist if for no other reason than it gives Democrats, any Democrat and any level, all the talking points they would ever need to demonstrate what kind of catastrophe happens when Republicans are in control. Instead, Trump is bragging on the great state of Kansas’ economy, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wants Brownback’s economic policies enacted in Washington, and Kansas despicable Secretary of State Kris Kobach was granted ultimate authority as a “significant author of the National Republican Platform.”

Now that the disaster in Kansas has been officially cited as the Republicans’ ultimate goal for the nation, it is baffling why Democrats aren’t devoting the lion’s share of their time and money bringing the rest of the country’s attention to exactly what Republicans have in store for Americans.

For dog’s sake Donald Trump has already proposed the typical Republican “path to prosperity” tax cuts for the rich as a starting point to rape and pillage all but the rich, and yet pundits and candidates alike are talking about his wife, his campaign, and his bigotry.

Here’s a clue: most Americans may abhor a bigot, a stripper as First Lady, and a campaign founded on mendacity, but what they really hate is an economic agenda that sends them straight into economic distress.

It is the agenda Brownback brought to stupid Kansas voters and now that the state is literally dying, Trump wants to unleash it on all Americans and have given Democrats a winning issue up and down the ballot – if they only use it to beat some sense into voters.

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Gov. Sam Brownback’s income tax cuts have caused huge revenue shortfalls in Kansas, as a state report clearly showed Friday. The Associated Press

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Kansas officials said Friday that total tax revenue for June fell a woeful $34 million below estimates, meaning even more cuts and adjustments are ahead for a beleaguered state.

However, that shortfall is not the most important figure in the Department of Revenue report.



This number is: $2.249 billion.

That’s how much individual income tax revenue the state collected in the 2016 fiscal year that ended Thursday.

Now look at a little history. It provides the cold, dismaying truth Kansans need to realize as their state bumbles along, close to being broke.

The reckless actions by Gov. Sam Brownback and the Legislature in 2012 to reduce income tax rates on all Kansans and unfairly eliminate this tax for 330,000 LLCs continue to devastate the state budget. Kansas government no longer can provide solid public services to 3 million people.

Why is Kansas in such horrible fiscal shape? It’s still the tax cuts, stupid.

▪ In the 2012 fiscal year, before any of Brownback’s income tax cuts kicked in, the Sunflower state raked in $2.908 billion in individual income taxes.

▪ In the 2013 fiscal year, the figure rose to $2.931 billion.

▪ But after the reductions were in place, that source of funds plummeted to $2.218 billion in the 2014 fiscal year, was $2.278 billion in the 2015 fiscal year and — again — reached just $2.249 billion in the 2016 fiscal year.

Yes, that’s even less than last year.

Do the math and a shocking truth emerges.

Kansas today is collected a staggering $650 million or so less in individual income tax revenues every year than it was before the tax cuts.

If the state had not foregone that revenue, the $34 million shortfall in June would have been just a small blip on the radar, nothing to be worried about.

But here the Sunflower State is, with its budget in shambles, just four years after Brownback pushed through tax reductions that he said would re-energize the economy, create new jobs and — perhaps most notably — replace some of the revenue lost through his actions.

None of that has happened.

Kansas has actually lost 700 jobs over the last year, for the sixth worst rate of growth in America, according to federal and state figures.

The tax cuts have forced the Legislature and governor to divert more than $1 billion from road upgrades, impose a large sales tax increase in 2015, slice tens of millions of dollars from universities and spend every cent of a once-healthy cash reserve of $700 million.

Brownback and his delusional followers offer flimsy excuses for the revenues being below expectations.

The projections were too optimistic!

The farm and oil economies are in horrible shape! (An excellent analysis this week by Peter Hancock of the Lawrence Journal-World knocks down much of that argument.)

And — hey — Kansas still took in more money in the 2016 fiscal year than in the 2015 fiscal year! (But barely, and it should have, especially after the Legislature last year approved the largest tax increase in history — which still didn’t come close to making up for the loss of income tax receipts.)

Ignore the prattle from the governor and his sycophants.

The real cause of the latest and continuing Kansas budget woes has been the move made in 2012 to dramatically lower individual income tax rates.

Read more here: www.kansascity.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/yael-t-abouhalkah/article87210507.html#storylink=cpy

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