Posted on 06/11/2017 7:11:28 AM PDT by Ennis85
OVERLAND PARK, Kan. – Kansas was at the heart of the tea party revolution, a red state where, six years ago, a deeply conservative group of Republicans took the state for a hard right turn. Now, after their policies failed to produce the results GOP politicians promised, the state has become host to another revolution: a resurgence of moderate Republicans.
Moderate Republicans joined with Democrats this week to raise state taxes, overriding GOP Gov. Sam Brownback’s veto and repudiating the conservative governor’s platform of ongoing tax cuts. The vote was a demonstration of the moderates’ newfound clout in the state Republican Party. Brownback was unable to successfully block the bill because many of the die-hard tax cut proponents had either retired or been voted out of office, losing to more centrist candidates in GOP primaries.
“The citizens of Kansas have said ‘It’s not working. We don’t like it.’ And they’ve elected new people.” said Sheila Frahm, a centrist Republican who served as lieutenant governor of Kansas and briefly as a U.S. senator.
Kansas’s moderate ascendance may portend problems for Republicans in Washington, where many in the party, including President Trump, are pushing to adopt federal tax policies similar to the ones Brownback has installed in Kansas. But while Brownback had hoped what he called Kansas’s “real-live experiment” in conservative economic policy would become a national model, it has instead become a cautionary example.
Brownback and his promised tax cuts were expected to spur enough economic growth to keep the government well funded, but when that economic boom never materialized, state lawmakers faced perennial deficits and had to implement spending reductions to close the gap. And when they did, some lawmakers found that while promising to cut spending plays well during a campaign, the subsequent loss of public services often proves-
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
That pretty boy Secretary of State will hopefully run for Gov. The rest of us can’t worry about red Kansas when there are midwest states to concentrate on. The fact that he could be Governor(+ a national star) will hopefully keep the state in line. Senate seats are the must-win. That chrome dome Roberts doesn’t help much.
Raising taxes. Now there’s a winning issue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eowwp6bkpo0
I wish the jack wagons in the Kansas statehouse would find a way to get the cost of our vehicle registrations in line with the other states too. Kansas is a high tax state. That’s their solution to everything.
How many times are we gonna hear this crap? No the Tea party is not out protesting. That is because they are running and winning state and local offices.
I wanted to find some perspective...to see just how huge this ‘revenue shortfall’ was. Its always listed in tens of millions of dollars, if not hundreds of millions. But that’s the shortfall against spending...I wanna know about REVENUE. That, suspiciously, is hard to find a news story about. So I found some info from the KS budget office, and here’s our total tax collections 2011-2016 (tax cuts were implemented in 2012):
2011 $8.17 Billion
2012 $8.75 Billion
2013 $8.91 Billion
2014 $8.47 Billion
2015 $8.54 Billion
2016 $8.67 Billion
Fairly flat
Next I looked at out population change, and from 2010 to 2016, its been a 1.9% increase.
If you look at 2011 vs 2016, we’ve actually had a 6% revenue increase vs a 1.9% increase. To be fair, we are down 2.7% from the 2013 high water mark.
But, the bottom line is, all this chaos, all this ‘the sky is falling’, ‘the state is broke’, the local headline ‘Rescuing Kansas from Brownback’, or from a few days ago ‘There’s no end in sight for Kansas’ Budget Misery’...its all about single digit percentage points. We’re spending almost $9 Billion a year, and we can’t figure out how to live on a few percentage points less?
The Kansas experiment (media’s term, not mine) will forevermore be held up as a cautionary tale against raising taxes by the left...but its really a cautionary tale about our addiction to spending.
That tea party rally was 9/12/2009, I was there along with almost 2 million other people.
The establishment empire strikes back.
It’s not surprising that GOPe is teaming with the rats. They have been Fabian rats the whole time. Question is, how do we send enough based reps up there to drive out GOPe leadership. Same thing in Washington.
If only that group had had the means to march to the capitol and the White House and stayed, how different things might have been. Instead it was the high water mark of Glenn Beck.
Funny, we just had a Tea Party meeting last Friday. Wishful thinking on the part of leftists Ana Swanson and Max Ehrenfreund.
Both women are proud pro-abortiinists, pro-sodimites RINOs, who would make Nancy Pelosi feel right at home!!!
Moderate Republicans are the Democrat party, they are just 30 years behind the curve.
I know because I've been in there fighting against the RINOs before we dreamed up the word.
The main fighting word is as it has always been about one word - abortion (really Christ, isn't it.)
Used to be mostly heavily funded by, if not totally supported by one man, the late, late term abortionist George Tiller, who, before his death, bought each and every elected Kansan, local, state and national except two and Sam Brownback is one of those.
Now that Tiller has "left the building," Planned Parenthood, NARAL and every other abortion champion have picked up that funding gap, along with the so-called "Human Rights(read pro-sodomite)," anti-gun, anti-school,choice, you name the left group, they fund them for RINOs seeking office in KS!
The Shelia Frahm mentioned in the article, was the lib Sam Brownback took on in the primary for US Senator from Kansas in 1994. We fought back hard against the Tiller abortion-backed RINOs (I say "we" as I worked full time for Sam in that race and the general election.
One thing missed by most people when looking at or talking about politics, especially in KS, is that our harder fought, better financed races are NOT in the general elections against the dims but in the primaries in August against other Republicans (that would be RINOs) when most libs are either away on vacations or otherwise ignoring. That's why they pushed "Advanced Voting," ideal to libs of all stripes who don't want to go to the polls or electioneer in Kansas not summers, plus it's much easier to permit illegal and fraudulent voting!
Nope, the TEA Party isn't dead, at least not in KS, it encumbers at least three groups = pro-life, social conservatives, the pro-second amendment proponents, the pro-school, home schoolers, all of whom hate raising taxes!
One of our funding champs were the Koch Brothers, who are against controlling our borders, thus no longer supporting many of us. Too bad but we all want illegals out of our state and support that effort.
I know you are very active in Kansas politics, for which I am very thankful :)
All I know is that is the cost of living is going to increase exponentially here.
The legislature that voted for this abomination all received encouragement from the KNEA, the Chammers of Commerce, the KS County and City Employees, and all KS government employees!
Would that the KS taxpayers all remember this sell out and act accordingly!
The SWAMP is popping up all over and telling citizens to shove it. The culture of government largesse is run amok. I’m going to invest in lamp posts and piano wire. This can’t continue unabated.
Predicting kind of like selecting your own lottery numbers.
Thanks for the ping. Sorry, I don’t have as much time to spend here as I’d like as we have an ill family member to look after.
Exactly, for the tax cuts to work they also had to reduce spending. Our medias trotted out the victims when it come to cutting spending so they were able to derail any kind of reduction in spending. Throw in our judicial system that oversteps it’s bounds when it comes to the legislative agenda and the tax cuts were bound to fail.
I’m sure they knew this going in, setting up the narrative that all this would fail if spending in government wasn’t reduced. I absolutely loathe these leftists and our leftist media that does a good job of controlling the political narrative in Kansas. The problem is, how do we bypass this culture and the media so that Kansans get good informed info on what is really going on in our government? Social medias are doing a good job on the national level but you don’t see much at the state and local levels.
I’ve noticed older folks have a lot of trust in our local medias. They think if they see it on local TV, it must be true. You wouldn’t believe all those I’ve had to deprogram from this line of thinking. Maybe we need local grassroots campaigns to inform Kansans not to trust the local medias when it comes to politics.
We’ve had lots of local and national businesses shut down or leave and this ties in directly with over-bloated government and taxation at all levels as a great example of the local medias not informing Kansans of the consequences of big over-bloated governments. It’s only going to get worse until we get our governments under control. We need to bring the real truth to the people of Kansas and tie all these failures to the leftists in Kansas and their corrupt media.
CGato
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