This month, CNBC came out with its annual list of America’s Top States for Business, a ranking on which states don’t move up or down very much from one year to the next. Which is why attention must be paid, as Americans for Tax Fairness has pointed out, to one massive exception to this rule. On this year’s list, Kansas placed 19th—which is a full 16 places higher than it placed last year.
How to account for this Bob Beamon–esque leap? Simple: Kansas has finally rid itself of the ruinous trickle-down tax policies of its former governor, Republican Sam Brownback.
In 2012, with the backing of the state's overwhelmingly Republican legislature, Kansas completely eliminated income taxes for more than 100,000 businesses and greatly reduced taxes on the wealthy. Invoking classic supply-side nonsense, Brownback predicted the cuts would more than pay for themselves. Instead, they devastated the state's economy. Revenues fell so precipitously that school years and school days had to be considerably shortened, public construction projects ground to a halt, and Medicaid benefits were greatly reduced. In consequence, the state's economy ceased producing jobs and Kansas fell behind its Plains States neighbors by virtually every economic index.
By 2016, Kansas voters—including Republicans who objected to seeing their children's educations shortchanged—revolted. As the Prospect’s Justin Miller reported at the time, Republican primary voters, joined by Democrats, ousted legislators who refused to repeal the tax cuts, and in 2017, the new legislature overrode Brownback’s veto of a bill repealing the cuts. In 2018, voters elected Democrat Laura Kelly as their new governor, and today, with adequate funding restored, Kansas has resumed its support for education, infrastructure, and the basics of civilization. Hence, the state’s leap upward on CNBC’s list.
The “logic” that underpinned the Kansas cuts was invoked again by President Trump and his Republican stooges as they made the case for the Great Federal Tax Giveaway to Corporations and the Rich Act of 2017–18. In consequence, share buybacks have soared to new heights while wages and infrastructure investment have barely risen, when they've risen at all. The federal government, of course, can run deficits, while states are constitutionally prohibited from doing so—which is why the Trumpistas have chiefly engaged in targeted rather than across-the-board cutbacks in federal spending. (The targets, of course, have been the poor and minorities.)
Brownback was politically run out of town on a rail—resigning early in 2018 to become the Trump administration's Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom. (Unlike Tsarist Russia, our government lacks a position like Procurator of the Holy Synod, a sort of directorship of pogroms, though Stephen Miller at times seems to have become that position's functional equivalent.) Is it too much to hope that American voters relegate Trump to history's dustbin as their Kansas compatriots did to Brownback?
