Far right wing Governor Sam Brownback of Kansas claimed his “trickle down” economic policies would be a panacea for Kansas. We are all familiar with the promise. A far right conservative swaggers in promoting tax cuts for the wealthy and for businesses pledging the reduced government revenues will be made up for by an increase in jobs and economic growth. Fat chance! The promise rests with an ignorance of basic economics and common sense. If the rich are given millions in tax breaks they don’t spend it on consumption, rather they invest it hedge funds or park it in some exotic tax haven. Promoting policies instead which grow the middle class, or even those, such as an increase in the minimum wage, which help the working poor who spend the entirety of their paychecks on groceries, clothes and other goods will grow the economy. Businesses sell more goods than before, they hire.
Right wingers worship at the altar of “trickle down” economics with a near religious fervor. Despite cutting taxes significantly for the wealthy, George W. Bush saw a net loss of private sector jobs over his two disastrous terms. On the other hand, President Obama after raising taxes on the wealthy although not to the levels under Bush, saw the economy produce over ten million private sector jobs during his two terms. Brownback when elected delivered on a promise to “cut the top personal income tax rate by 29 percent and exempt more than 330,000 farmers and business owners from income taxes,” according to CBSNews. Since then Kansas has been an economic basket case. When re-elected in 2014, Brownback promised 100,000 new jobs would be created for a gain of 2,100 a month. So far, jobs have grown at the anemic pace of 1,700 jobs or just 100 a month. “In 2015, job growth in Kansas was a mere 0.1 percent, even as the nation’s economy grew 1.9 percent,” according to New York Magazine. Job growth has trailed neighboring states. And New York Magazine reports: “What’s more, personal income growth slowed dramatically since the tax cuts went into effect.”
And at what cost? To balance budgets given lower tax revenues and anemic economic growth, repair of highways is deferred, funding for universities has been slashed, “and K-12 schools were almost shut down in the summer over lack of state money,” according to the Kansas City Star. But Republicans like Brownback have an advantage: they do not believe in the public sphere anyway. After all, the wealthy do not go to public schools. They do not even use the same police force as the rest of us because most gated enclaves hire their own security firms. They may drive on the same roads we do and use the public university system, nevertheless eventually the deterioration of public institutions hurts as all. As the quality of education declines, upward mobility declines. The sizable gap between the rich and the poor becomes insurmountable.
Republicans have a unique approach to these failures, as the “conservative paradise” created by Brownback has demonstrably been. They simply deny them and create alternative realities. For instance, instead of simply changing course and raising revenues by raising taxes, Brownback has taken another approach. Likely, it is because self-awareness is not as characteristic of conservatives as is stubbornness and inflexibility. Brownback’s remedy to his economic ills is to abolish the quarterly report that measures the administration's economic policies. Like Republicans in the nation’s capital killed the funding for the research done by the Center for Disease Control to study gun violence and have tried to quiet government climate scientists because the right does not like their pesky research, Brownback is using the same tactic to bury his failures.
“The Council of Economic Advisors, which is chaired by Brownback, will no longer compile and distribute a review of economic markers picked by the administration and championed as an accountability test of the administration's economic vision.”
”Heidi Holliday, executive director of the nonprofit center in Topeka, said the end of the council's economic assessment tool was an attempt to minimize public exposure of weaknesses in Brownback's program to build the state's economy by exempting 330,000 businesses from the income tax and reducing individual state income tax.”
Republicans, reportedly the party of individual responsibility, obviously do not believe in accountability. When reality does not mesh with ideology, Republicans do not change their ideology, rather they attempt to change reality. As goes a frightening statement attributed to Bush aide Karl Rove, the media and others were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do." Interesting! George Orwell could not have said it better.
So the laboratory of conservative trickle down economics has failed miserably. Of course, Brownback says he needs more time, even as voters and many Republicans themselves grow restless. But his behavior is a case study in how Republicans react to real tests of their policies. After all, the maxim goes “
Conservatism can not fail, it can only be failed.” Brownback may be measuring the success of his far right economic policies not in years, but in epochs. Too bad reality never intrudes on conservative thinking!
