No, Tax Cuts Really, Really, Really Didn’t Create Growth in Kansas
When It Comes to Kansas’s Trickle-Down Failure, Who Are You Going to Believe: Reality, or Sam Brownback?
The tweet you are about to read represents the closest I’ve ever come to doing a literal spit take. I had just sipped from my nice, hot cup of coffee and then this remarkable quote flowed through my Twitter stream:
I’ve already posted once today about the abysmal tax plan that Republicans are trying to pass in the Senate this week, but this quote from Republican Kansas Governor Sam Brownback demands another. That the GOP brought Brownback down to the Capitol in order to cheerlead for the Ryan/Trump tax cuts is more than just hubris—it’s downright delusional.
Some background: in 2011, after being elected governor of Kansas, Brownback decided to embark on the greatest trickle-down experiment in the history of America. He decided to use every man, woman, and child in Kansas as lab rats in a scheme that shifted wealth to the richest Kansans in the form of huge tax cuts.
I’m aware that this sounds like I’m misquoting Brownback, or playing roughshod with the record, but that’s not the case. He announced the experiment, using exactly that language, in an interview on Morning Joe in June of 2012:
“On taxes, you need to get your overall rates down, and you need to get your social manipulation out of it, in my estimation, to create growth. We’ll see how it works. We’ll have a real live experiment.”
With the help of a Republican supermajority in the Kansas state legislature, Brownback then set out to create the conservative paradise of his dreams. He hacked regulations down to the nub, slashed and eliminated taxes, and kept the minimum wage as low as he possibly could. In other words, Brownback did everything he could to create favorable conditions for the trickle down theory to play out in real life.
The story that Brownback used to sell those tax cuts to Kansans was simple: if you give more money to the top one percent, he argued, that wealth will then trickle down to you in the form of more jobs and higher wages. Brownback cut taxes and regulations at unprecedented levels. He argued that those cuts would result in economic growth for all Kansans. It’s a simple theory to understand, and the conclusion should be very easy to measure.
The experiment ended earlier this year, and the results were conclusive — Brownback’s theory was entirely wrong. Business did not grow. In fact, the top one percent simply took the money from the tax cuts and kept it. They didn’t re-invest in the state. That money didn’t flow back into the state’s coffers in the form of increased revenue and hiring. In fact, the state lost a ton of money, as Vox’s Alexia Fernández Campbell reported in June:
In recent years, lawmakers raised sales taxes and cigarette taxes to help balance the budget — a move that places a larger burden on low-income families. They also slightly reduced the tax deduction people can claim for mortgage interest and property tax payments. But even those moves weren’t enough to fill the state’s budget hole.
The budget crisis has collided with a long-running battle over public school funding. The state’s public schools are shouldering the burden of the state’s budget crisis, with $44.5 million cut from public education in 2015 alone.
So the budget crisis resulted in woefully underfunded schools, which themselves became a crisis. Jobs weren’t created. Tax burdens for the lowest-income Kansans actually increased, even as the wealthiest Kansans kept their money to themselves. The experiment was a massive failure by every measurable metric. Every single one of Brownback’s theories proved to be false.
The Republican-majority legislature eventually tried to raise taxes to deal with the crisis that the tax cuts caused. But Brownback — always truer to his trickle-down vision than to the people he represents — vetoed a bill to end his tax reform “experiment.” In June of this year, the legislature overrode Brownback’s veto, returning taxes to something much closer to pre-experiment levels. By doing this, the state Republican Party admitted that their trickle-down policies didn’t work.
Brownback, though, hasn’t learned a goddamned thing. In fact, he’s fallen back on the last resort for scoundrels: he’s flat-out lying, saying that his tax cuts “actually worked.” And he’s repeating this lie directly to the Republicans who will in the next few days decide whether or not to expand the Kansas Experiment to encompass the entire United States of America.
Brownback’s lies arrive less than 24 hours after a compelling Kansas City Star editorial aimed directly at Kansas Senator Jerry Moran, titled “Kansans beg Sen. Jerry Moran: ‘Why take this failed experiment nationwide?’” You should read the whole thing, but this paragraph (emphasis mine) really highlights the audacity of Brownback’s statement:
At a forum Moran held at the Tasty Pastry in Clay Center last weekend, one of his constituents, Robynn Andracsek, of Olathe, neatly summed up the apparent thinking behind the bill: “Let’s cut taxes for millionaires and billionaires, and then let’s figure out how to pay for it.” Instead, she pleaded with him, “Let’s do a sensible tax cut. This is Kansas. We know the trickle-down experiment doesn’t work. All of our members of Congress from Kansas should know that.”
The message to Moran, and to all Republicans in the Senate, is clear. Don’t listen to the lies coming from Kansas’s governor when it comes to tax cuts.
Listen to the people of Kansas, instead.
(Portions of this essay were originally published on June 7th, 2017.)
