Old saying...”...lonesome as a tourist in Kansas.”
The tax cuts and increases had nothing to do with it.
Cherry picking statistics.
Part of California’s success has been quantitative easing and efforts to prop up the stock market has caused a lot of California businesses to do very well. Coupled with their housing market being strong right now due to Chinese millionaires buying up everything for sale, the state has had growth.
Kansas relies on more traditional agriculture and petroleum for its money and both and still clobbered.
To analogize it, the rich kid made a ton of money working for his dad’s company and selling off his second hand goods to rich Chinese neighbors while the poor kid is struggling because the farm where he works is in drought.
If I was going to pick a control for comparison to a state with booming businesses in information tech and mass entertainment, it wouldn’t be Kansas.
Kansas taxes are still awfully high.
They have a 3 tier state income tax 3.5%-6.45% to go with that state sales tax.
California has an immense amount of talent and money coming into it whereas Kansas not so much.
Much of the money is coming from China. Fully one third of houses in San Francisco Los Angeles as well as Seattle are now being bought by overseas Chinese.
Americans are moving out of LA and San Francisco.
The talent coming into California is coming from both the USA and overseas. Silicon valley sinecures are now the coveted ivy leage positions like wall st was two decades ago. 37% of silicon valley workers are foreign born.
The USA has many centers of intellectual property generation
but the greatest of these are in the silicon valley and LA area.
Kansas does not develop much intellectual property.
A lot of tax revenue CA gets comes from capital gains so when the stock market does good as it has been, they do good. Wait till the stock market dives and see what happens.
Comparing Kansas to California?!?! Hey asshats, how about apples to apples here. How is California doing compared to Texas? Silence to ensue.
Kansas is a farming state, influenced more by the price of grains, which are currently low, than the tax rate.
Wasn’t it the Washington Post a few years back that scrambled to give out bonuses to its staff before the Obamacare tables went into effect?
“2 billion into a rainy day fund”
They can say only because they are kicking the can down the road on underfunded pensions.
Also, California was hit hard by the recession. So they were going to grow more by percentage because they were hit harder. When the next one comes, There will be fewer wealthy people and more poor people in California. Almost all of this comes from a few companies in Silicon Valley. You take out LA and San Fran and you have a shaky economy. Don’t worry they won’t make it through the next slow down.
As I sit here in Kansas, a few opinions.
First, much of our economy is tied to agricultural commodities...recessions aren’t as bad for us, and the rebounds aren’t as steep.
Next - this is the first year in seven where no part of Kansas is considered to be in drought...remember those ag commodities.
What else do we produce? Oil. Those ‘evil Koch brothers’ are in the oil and gas business in Kansas, in case you’ve never thought of Kansas as an oil producing state. Well, that sector had a rapid growth but is now declining.
Another factor in our state budget: The state supreme court is unconstitutionally dictating state education funding...causing endless special legislative sessions, raiding of highway funds and rainy day funds, and great uncertainty as the state abdicates other responsibilities (to pay for mandated education funds) and forces the counties to suddenly take over - and figure out how to fund them.
And there is a constant clamoring to raise taxes...and I’m confident when Brownback goes, taxes will be raised.
In other words, primarily because liberals will not accept that they lost an election, they refuse to allow us to have a predictable and stabile economic environment...they create chaos and blame Brownback.
A huge part of Kansas economy depends on oil, gas, and aviation. All of these have done not so well in recent years.
The referenced article overlooks problems concerning state taxation v. constitutional restraints on federal government taxation that are wrongly ignored.
Regarding federal taxation, the article ignores that a previous generation of state sovereignty-respecting justices had clarified that Congress is prohibited from appropriating taxes in the name of state power issues, essentially any issue that Congress cannot justify under its constitutional Article I, Section 8-limited powers.
“Congress is not empowered to tax for those purposes which are within the exclusive province of the States.” —Justice John Marshall, Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.
And given that the corrupt Washington cartel is taxing and spending for many things that it cannot justify under Congress’s Section 8-limited powers, unconstitutional federal taxation gets us back to Kansas.
More specifically, consider that while Kansas cut taxes to try to boost its economy, Kansas, like all the other states, continues to arguably lose state revenues because of unconstitutonal federal taxes that its citizens are paying, taxes that corrupt Congress spends on things that it cannot justify under its Section 8-limited powers as previously mentioned.
So given that things might have turned out differently for Kansas if the feds weren’t stealing state revenues through unconstitutional taxes, the pro-tax comparison of California taxes versus Kansas taxes might not hold water.
California is even putting 2 billion into a rainy day fund to pay debt? they will never see daylight they just keep digging the hole deeper every year.
Because you’ve got the cause and effect reversed in this instance. They increased taxes precisely BECAUSE their economy was improving in CA. And they cut taxes in KS because their economy was weakening. In effect the strength of the economy determined whether taxes would be increased rather than the reverse.
Convenient apples and oranges.
Kansas no silicon valley....... it’s that simple
the growth in silicon valley is greater than the losses in LA and elsewhere from corporate movements out of state.
bkmk