Mike Tomasky on the hopefulness of what has happened in Kansas
Quote:The most momentous political news of the past week? For my money, it wasn’t James Comey’s Senate testimony, riveting as it was. It was the Kansas Legislature’s decision to defy the governor and raise income taxes — a move that could well be the first step in a transformation of American politics much more far-reaching than anything that could come from Russiagate.
Hear me out. Kansas, under Gov. Sam Brownback, has come as close as we’ve ever gotten in the United States to conducting a perfect experiment in supply-side economics. The conservative governor, working with a conservative State Legislature, in the home state of the conservative Koch brothers, took office in 2011 vowing sharp cuts in taxes and state spending, except for education — and promising that those policies would unleash boundless growth.
The taxes were cut, and by a lot. The cumulative cut was forecast to be $3.9 billion by 2019. A fellow at a right-leaning Missouri think tank said in 2015 that Mr. Brownback’s cuts were “the biggest tax cut of any state, relative to the size of its economy, in recent history.”
The cuts came. But the growth never did. As the rest of the country was growing at rates of just above 2 percent, Kansas grew at considerably slower rates, finally hitting just 0.2 percent in 2016. Revenues crashed. Spending was slashed, even on education: In March, the State Supreme Court ruled that state-level school spending was unconstitutionally low. The court is ideologically mixed, but its ruling was unanimous.
The experiment has been a disaster. Mr. Brownback is widely disliked. If he has anything to be grateful for, it’s the existence of Gov. Chris Christie, Republican of New Jersey, who recently swiped from him the title of the nation’s most unpopular governor, which Mr. Brownback had held for the better part of three years...
NYT
As I've argued before, the proposed structure of governance advanced by modern US conservatives (not all, but many) is one which has no exemplars across the western world. It is almost entirely theoretical. It is held as a matter of faith that it will work - that it will provide more prosperity and liberty than is enjoyed in the sort of liberal democracies seen across the free world.
The importance of Brownback's "experiment" in Kansas is that we now have a test case. And that test case has failed badly.
GOP legislators in Kansas have slowly come to recognize and concede to the experiment's catastrophic consequences. Brownback himself, of course, refuses to admit to this failing. Will the Koch brothers or Grover Norquist or other such extremist ideologues and key agents in advancing this ideology change their minds in light of the Kansas failure? Almost certainly not. Why not?
Because what most of us would mean or conceive of the phrase, "government is working" is quite different from what those people would mean by that same phrase.
Say, for example, that a state has an excellent educational system built up which sets and maintains high learning standards, keeps a commendable percentage of kids in the system, and which produces accomplished and promising graduates at a high rate, for the people we are speaking about, little of this will fall under the heading of "government is working" because government has no legitimate role in education.
Edit: Let me add another. Ten or twenty or thirty million Americans, under a new government program, get medical insurance coverage which they did not have before. Most citizens would conceive this to be an example of "government working". But for the type of modern right wing ideologue we are speaking about, that outcome is not even relevant in their definition of the phrase. Because it is a government program, and a big one, it is the opposite of "government working". To them, this is government as oppressor.
