Posted on 06/25/2017 10:14:44 AM PDT by qaz123
"What's the matter with Kansas?" In 2004, Thomas Frank asked the question fearing a "right-wing class war grown so powerful" that it induced "the common people" to vote against their own interests.
Now, 13 years later, pundits are asking the same question—but under drastically different circumstances.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsweek.com ...
Kansas' Tax Cut Experiment Was A Predictable Failure People like lower taxes, JUST NOT LOWER SPENDING. Kansas is a lesson that you can’t have the former without the latter....I capitalized the middle as my Mac doesn't allow me to highlight, for some reason.
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Reason headline seems to be a tad different than the one that Newsweek, put up. Gee, I wonder why.
Basically, all this article tells us, is that there has never been, nor will there every be, an issue in collecting money from the taxpayer. The fundamental problem is the spending that "unaccountable" politicians and bureaucrats do, every day, as if that is part of their job description.
If I'm not mistaken, Kansas also has quite the issue with illegals and refugees. I'd be interested to see how much money would be saved if even, half of them were sent back to where they came from. But, hey, lets not wasteful spending on people that hate us, be factored into any discussion. That would be, just plain wrong.
I seem to recall reading that in the long run the economy did Very Well under him and that things DID in fact turn around.
The people who like lower taxes are not the people who like government spending.
The people who like government spending are not the people who are paying the taxes.
No one reads NewsWeak, it died a long time ago.
The only people who MIGHT read it don’t speak English, and are usually illiterate.
Third strike is that the articles are written at grade school level or lower.
So they’re out.
Why post them?
They got nothin’.
Gutless coward RINOcrats posing as conservative Republicans.
This article was a true eye opener. I had no idea Newsweak was still around.
This article was a true eye opener. I had no idea Newsweak was still around.
Because, there’s a chance that someone on here is actually from Kansas or might have a better understanding on what is actually happening there.
Yeah, and if anyone started to score a point on her, she would ramp up the volume of her voice, like one of those old-fashioned crank sirens, louder and louder until her antagonist (usually Fred Barnes) shut up, cowering in his chair with his hands over his ears.
And,,, she and her late husband used to live in the Cleveland area and were on the news every day!
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', yesterday's 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 cutting taxes by the left...but its really a cautionary tale about our addiction to spending.
Yup...I have a family member who used this as a hammer for every GOP tax cutting initiative...
It is doomed to fail just like Kansas...
Of course he doesn't recognize that tax cutting works to raise revenue have been proved numerous times over the last 60 years...
Yes we’re sure doomed!
We should bring in more democrats to “fix the economy”
Kansas property taxes are out of control. We have ties there and have considered living there, but we simply choose not to afford it.
We do admire the new gun laws they have managed to implement. Lots of good people in Kansas too.
The people who like government spending are not the people who are paying the taxes.
Well, Well, Well, Do the people who like LOWER Taxes show up to vote in the Primaries? Right now I would say that they do not
Is that a sign of Insanity?
Wait until the increase taxes to the prior levels. Then we’ll see what works.
We should have dumped off Clift in ISIS-held Syria a long time ago.
The people who like government spending are not the people who are paying the taxes.
And everyone wants the government to make cuts to programs that other people use.
The liberals have failed in Kansas and its gonna be Brownback’s fault for decades.
If only they could have not previously outspent all the money that was saved.
Missid it by ‘that’ much!
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