Kansas Republicans abandon Brownback; raise taxes over his veto Remember Kansas’s great tax-cutting experiment under Governor Sam Brownback? (Me, sarcastic?) As always in Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore La-La Land, cutting taxes leads to economic nirvana. Except when it doesn’t, and it didn’t in Kansas. I recently wrote about the idiocy of Investor Business Daily‘s criticisms of California, and Paul Krugman carried the ball further, citing me and bringing in a comparison with Kansas (Brownback and Jerry Brown both took office in 2011). As Kansas cut taxes and California raised them, Kansas managed to raise employment by 5% from 2011 to 2017, whereas California’s job growth was a rather more impressive 15% over the same period. As it turns out, Kansas’s
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Kansas Republicans abandon Brownback; raise taxes over his veto
Remember Kansas’s great tax-cutting experiment under Governor Sam Brownback? (Me, sarcastic?) As always in Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore La-La Land, cutting taxes leads to economic nirvana. Except when it doesn’t, and it didn’t in Kansas.
I recently wrote about the idiocy of Investor Business Daily‘s criticisms of California, and Paul Krugman carried the ball further, citing me and bringing in a comparison with Kansas (Brownback and Jerry Brown both took office in 2011). As Kansas cut taxes and California raised them, Kansas managed to raise employment by 5% from 2011 to 2017, whereas California’s job growth was a rather more impressive 15% over the same period. As it turns out, Kansas’s problems weren’t limited to poor job growth.
As Alexia Fernandez Campbell points out at vox.com, one major change “eliminated taxes on owner-operated businesses, known as pass-throughs.” This created an incentive for people to switch from being employees to being separate businesses providing exactly the same services. Tax avoidance reduced tax revenue by an estimated 1.7%, while the total reduction in tax revenue was 8%. With losses of this magnitude, Kansas ran into persistent budget trouble. For this, it was rewarded by Standard & Poors with credit downgrades in 2014 and 2016. By contrast, California saw its credit upgraded by the rating agencies several times. Both states now have an AA- rating from S&P, which is the fourth-best rating but below average for U.S. states.
By this week, the Republican-supermajority Kansas Legislature had had enough. Overriding Brownback’s veto, the legislature passed a repeal of most of Brownback’s tax cuts, including the pass-through provision mentioned above. Hopefully the state will now be able to begin repairing its six-year fiscal nightmare.
Do I have to tell you that Laffer and Moore are the main advisers behind Trump’s tax plan, too?