It's official (again). Republican policies are (again)
bad for children (again):
It may seem intuitive that states that invest more in public services are better places for children to grow up, but the Foundation for Child Development now has the numbers to prove it. The foundation is out with a new study that confirms the “strong relationship” between higher state taxes and children’s health. [...]
Some of the key findings include:
[...] States that have higher tax rates generate higher revenues and have higher [Child Well-Being Index] values than states with lower tax rates. [...]
The amount of public investments in programs is strongly related to CWI values among states. Specifically, higher per-pupil spending on education, higher Medicaid child-eligibility thresholds, and higher levels of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) benefits show a substantial correlation with child well-being across states.
So, there you go. Again. As it turns out, spending money to take care of children makes children's lives substantially and measurably better, and spending on children is predicated on taxing to pay for those programs. So if you want to cut those programs so that rich people don't have to pay the same tax rates they would have had to at any other time in modern American history, you are hurting those kids. Go figure. You're also hurting the economy when they grow up sicker and/or less educated than they could have been, and you're also generally just a rotten, rotten excuse for a person, but I suppose all that has been said before too.
Speaking of hurting kids, Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback (a Republican of the brown-people-hating Cretaceous variety) really, really likes hurting kids. Recently one of them quite correctly pointed out that he sucks, which I guess he's still retaliating against or something. He's just introduced a new state tax plan that—can you guess?—raises taxes on poor people, and cuts taxes on the richest. Because he really and truly sucks, that's why.
As ITEP put it, “Governor Brownback’s tax reform proposal would actually make the Kansas tax structure more unfair and ensure that low and middle income families pay more, while dramatically decreasing state taxes owed by the wealthiest Kansans.”
Kansas’ own Department of Treasury came to the same conclusions, finding that low-income Kansans would see their taxes go up under the plan, sending Brownback’s administration into damage control. And so far, state lawmakers aren’t lining up to lend the plan their support.
Given that the prime—no, I think the only—substantive policy among Republicans today is that rich people need to pay less taxes and poor and middle-class Americans should of course pay more to make up for it, I think it's fair to consider that fine evidence of just how thoroughly bought and paid for our political class is. You would think that such obviously stupid proposals would result in the proponents being tarred and feathered, but no. We're lucky if we can even get a public acknowledgement from media figures that that's what any of these individual so-called "tax cut" policies would do.
We can say definitively that all these silly Republican proposals would increase the deficit, or raise taxes on the poor, or result in massive cuts to social services. Cain's plan, Romney's plan, Santorum's plan, Sam Brownback's plan: same plans, different names on the cover page. So it's nothing less than terrifying to see how difficult it is to just get those outcomes even acknowledged in the political discourse. You can chalk it up to reporter shallowness, perhaps, but it would be stupid to discount the plain fact that rich people are paying for these candidates, and paying for these tax "proposals" and other introduced legislation, and own the outlets by which most Americans get their information about these plans and these candidates, and golly-gee-willikers it seems like the more consolidated the power of the wealthy becomes, over political speech, the more narrowly the elected officials they finance hew to policies that would benefit them, and only them, at the expense of every other American.
So, fine: Republicans hate children. They really, really hate them. Go ahead, Republicans, dispute it all you want, but if you're constantly proposing policies that hurt the poor, the sick, and the young so that the likes of Willard Mitt Romney doesn't have to pay such a scary 15%-or-so tax rate, that seems to support my point of view more than yours. Why anyone in America is still insisting on being polite about those policies, I couldn't tell you.