That word, experiment, has come to haunt Brownback as the data rolls in. The governor promised his pro-growth tax policy would act like a shot of adrenaline in the heart of the Kansas economy, but, instead, state revenues plummeted by nearly $700 million in a single fiscal year, both Moodys and Standard & Poors downgraded the states credit rating, and job growth sagged behind all four of Kansas neighbors. Brownback wound up nixing a planned sales-tax cut to make up for some of the shortfall, but not before hed enacted what his opponents call the largest cuts in education spending in the history of Kansas. Brownback hardly stands alone among the class of Republican governors who managed to get themselves elected four years ago as part of the anti-Obama Tea Party wave by peddling musty supply-side fallacies. In Ohio, Gov. John Kasich – whose press releases claim hes wrought an Ohio Miracle – has presided over a shrinking economy, this past July being the 21st consecutive month in which the states job growth has lagged behind the national average. In Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker, whose union-busting inadvertently helped kick off the Occupy movement, cut taxes by roughly $2 billion – yet his promise to create 250,000 new private-sector jobs during his first term has fallen about 150,000 jobs short, and forecasters expect the state to face a $1.8 billion budgetary shortfall by mid-2017. A recent analysis by the Detroit Free Press, meanwhile, laid out how the tax policies of Gov. Rick Snyder, a wealthy entrepreneur who campaigned in Michigan as a nerdy technocrat, have resulted in businesses paying less ($1.7 billion less per year, to be exact), individuals paying more ($900 million per year) and – heres the kicker – job growth slowing every year since Snyders cuts have been enacted. Snyder and Walker remain in dead heats with their Democratic opponents, with Kasich holding a comfortable lead over his own. Of all these geniuses, though, Brownback exists in a class of his own, thanks both to the vainglorious scale of his project and the inescapable reality of its flop.
Posted on: Sat, 25 Oct 2014 17:07:43 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015