"I can't believe I screwed things up this badly."
How bad are things in Sam Brownback's Kansas right now? So bad that conservative governors in other states are taking a look at the state and saying,
"yeah, let's not be like that guy."
Republicans once idolized Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback as a tax cutting superstar — now he’s a lesson in what not to do.
“It’s a cautionary tale on a national scale … Many of us felt that [Kansas] had been too aggressive,” said Indiana Senate Majority Leader and tax committee chairman Brandt Hershman, who helped GOP Gov. Mike Pence cut corporate taxes last spring. “We all like low taxes … but we have to ensure the stability of a revenue stream to provide basic services that our citizens expect.”
Politico indicates that Indiana legislators aren't the only Republicans who are whistling past Brownback's graveyard. Conservatives in Iowa, Arizona, Missouri, Ohio and Wisconsin are all taking a look at the
massive budget hole and the lack of job growth in Kansas, and realizing that, just maybe, they need to scale back their own dreams of cutting even more taxes than they already have.
Head below the fold to learn why the Republican tax cuts aren't all they're cracked up to be.
Another lesson? They need not to rely on overly optimistic revenue projections that expect that the tax cuts will have an outsized impact on growth and job creation:
Unlike Brownback, who slashed income taxes by about 25 percent right away then set up a system to reduce them more over time, Ohio has taken an incremental approach, giving taxpayers a 10 percent income tax cut over Kasich’s first three years.
They also have proposed to pay for additional cuts through a new oil severance tax increase. Brownback also proposed some offsets to his tax cuts — throwing out certain tax breaks — but legislators gutted those, making the cost of his tax plan soar.
Another difference: They won’t rely on optimist revenue growth assumptions, a major critique of Kansas’ cuts.
Not that Kansas is in a unique boat: Governor Scott Walker's tax cuts in Wisconsin aren't producing the revenue they expected either, disappointing Laffer Curve theorists everywhere. So what's the Republican solution to the fact that tax cuts don't in fact create jobs and grow the economy? Do them anyway, except, more slowly so people don't notice the damage:
Other states are looking at similar approaches. In Georgia, which is sandwiched by two states with no income taxes, Republicans want to lower the income tax rate. They don’t currently have the funds, said GOP state Senate Finance Committee Chairman Judson Hill, but when they do, they’ll protect against revenue shortfalls by taking things slowly to “minimize near-term shortfalls.”
That's the ticket. See, if you heat the water too fast, the frog will jump out of the Laffer Curve pot. Heat the tax cut water just a little more slowly and incrementally, and you can slow-boil your way to a no-tax, no-service state. That seems to be the new Republican paradigm in the wake of Brownback's tax cut catastrophe.