Don't worry, I'm perfectly calm in between guffaws
Post# of 65629
You seem to have a fixation on N. Korea. Why go to a country run by reds when I have a choice of States run, run down, by GOPERS?
Here's an 'experiment' the Trump admin. would be wise to not attempt:
Quote:
This isn’t in Kansas anymore, Toto.
Gov. Sam Brownback is making Kansas an unrecognizable Libertarian mess.
Kansas Governor Sam Brownback is taking GOP ideals to the extreme, and with a GOP heavy state legislature, there is no one there to reason with him and tell him just how bad his ideals are for the big picture.
After severely bankrupting his state by running a trickle down “experiment” with taxes, he’s now gone crazy slashing education, investment in infrastructure, arts, social programs and making laws that affect women, the poor and the population in general negatively.
4. Cuts to education: After running his state into the ground by cutting income taxes for rich people (facing a $600 million deficit), Gov. Brownback assured Kansans that he wouldn’t cut from education.
And then he turned around and cut $54 million from public school funding and is projected to cut more. Some schools in small towns even had to close their doors, and with every education cut comes the laying off of teachers and faculty.
Kansas is already on the middle-low end of student spending, but recent data isn’t available to see exactly how these cuts have affected student spending. Brownback is also making ambitious changes to school funding, with SB7, which opponents say favors block grants that give schools more flexibility on student spending but will deeply cut operational funding.
And with these cuts, the GOP gets exactly what they really need — a generation of people too stupid to know how terrible conservative ideals are.
1. Tax reform: Economists call Brownback’s tax reform an economic nightmare. I’ve mentioned several times that Gov. Brownback cut income taxes that led to the dire state of affairs in his state. More specifically, in 2011 Brownback made good on a campaign promise to almost eliminate income taxes in his state. His solution for the lost revenue would be to increase the sales tax, but increasing the sales tax shifts the tax burden from the rich onto the poor. His tax plan also didn’t account for the major loss in revenue and he didn’t have a plan to cover the spending the state is accountable for. Today Brownback is facing a projected $600 million deficit.
And as far as libertarian ideals go, it really was the perfect plan — bankrupting the state so he can cut back on social programs without taking a ton of flack for doing so, and that’s exactly how it played out. Important to note, the Democrats favorite boogeymen, the Koch brothers, are based in Wichita and were huge supporters of Brownback’s campaign, so you can imagine how big their role is in this “experiment.”
Now Brownback is trying to figure out a way to save face and save his state, but his hands are tied by the promises he has made. He tells Kansans that reform takes time but it will pay off, and that he wants to stay the course and needs their patience, but his constituents were becoming disgruntled before his last re-election.
The good news is, is that whenever liberals need a perfect example of just how big of a failure supply-side economics is in practice, they only have to point to Kansas.