In South East Kansas, not too far from Pittsburg, sits Big Brutus. One of the largest coal shovels ever erected. It lays dormant now, out of work. While Big Brutus is a historical monument, the job losses in Kansas aren’t historical, they are happening monthly. And like miners of an earlier era, the Brownback economy is the Republican canary in the mine — and reports like the one issued today tell you the canary is on life support.
www.kansascity.com/…
Here are the lowlights.
▪ The state lost 5,600 jobs from June to July.
▪ The unemployment rate jumped to 4.1 percent from 3.8 percent in June.
▪ Over the last year, Kansas has actually shed 4,500 jobs.
▪ The Sunflower State’s “growth” rate over that 12 months is a minus 0.3 percent — 5th worst in the nation. Only Wyoming, North Dakota, Louisiana and Oklahoma were behind Kansas.
▪ Kansas had employment of 1,395,700 in July 2016 — or a stunning 600 fewer jobs than when Brownback’s second term started way back in January 2015.
▪ Finally, Kansas is nowhere close to adding the 2,000 jobs a month that Brownback had pledged during his re-election campaign in 2014.
Yael T. Abouhalkah’s assessment of the Brownback economy paints a gloomy picture. What’s worse for Republicans, though, is that Donald Trump is traveling the nation like a snake oil salesman and offering the Kansas “solution” as bottled elixir for the nation’s ills, and the data to back up his argument looks worse every day.
While national figures point to Kansas as a failure of epic proportions, Donald Trump seems to find joy in the idea that Kansas leadership is home of some unique knowledge about how to build big segments of the economy.
Earlier this week, Donald Trump named Sam Brownback as one of his “key advisors” on agriculture policy, including trade. Meanwhile, Kris Kobach, Kansas Secretary of State, became a significant author of the National Republican Platform.
With the Kansas brain trust bringing their battle plan to the national Republican party, you’d think more attention would be paid to how this experiment actually works out.
Here’s the cliff notes: hospitals closing. Lack of medical access. Schools underfunded. Budgets raided. Pay-day loan financing of state debt considered. Job losses.
This is the Republican vision of the future. Sam Brownback called it his “live experiment", with the canary dead, the rest of the nation can only point, gasp, and sometimes shake their head in laughter.
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