The Egg on Kansas Governor Samuel Brownback's Face

    Ok, it's nice to see, especially when he makes snarky comments like this:

    "In a recent interview, the governor pointed to a record number of Kansans employed in the private sector and a jump in new business starts, all while one of the state's largest industries, aviation manufacturing, struggles. The governor added that employment is particularly strong along the Kansas-Missouri border, where it is easiest for businesses and people to cross state lines to respond to the tax cuts."

    "It's like going through surgery. It takes a while to heal and get growing afterwards," Mr. Brownback said in his office, a painting of Ronald Reagan hanging behind him. "The left in the country desperately wants this to fail. They want to say, 'You can't cut taxes and grow your way out of things.' 

     http://www.wsj.com/articles/sam-brownbacks-tax-cut-push-puts-kansas-out-on-its-own-1402448126

    Hmm. The surgery analogy. Is this his idea of a selling point? And 'The Left' need not worry about this proving supply side economics as even The Right is admitting this is a failure at least for now. 

   http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2015/06/sam-brownbacks-kansas-failure-at-least.html

    http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=29623

   Again, when Sumner says the supply side experiment for states isn't an unqualified success you know it's pretty near an unqualified failure. 

    However, as gratifying as looking at the egg in his face may be, at the end of the day, it's still low income people who end up paying the price for his failed experiment. 

     Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback's signature personal income tax cuts emerged mostly intact from a grueling legislative fight to close a budget deficit that arose after revenue failed to match the conservative governor's predictions of an economic boom.

    "Brownback and his GOP allies managed to avoid backtracking on past reductions on income tax rates. But they had to slow down future rate cuts with the provision that if revenues grow they could be restored. And they agreed to a small tweak to business tax breaks that are a central plank of his strategy to spur growth."

     "Instead, they raised the state's sales tax to one of the highest rates in the nation and smokers will be paying 50 cents more for each pack of cigarettes. Republican legislators cobbled together a mix of tax policies to both balance the budget and attract just enough votes for passage, but it's not yet clear whether they've created long-term fiscal stability."

     http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/sam-brownback-kansas-sales-tax-hike-budget

     So yes liberals may take pleasure in the headlines that the Governor is forced to raise taxes until they realize that it's the taxes of the poor and struggling. Basically when the dust clears, Brownback slashed the taxes of the rich and raised them on nonrich. 

    Even if this leads to revenue being restored, most Kansas folks are going to be worse off than prior to the initial tax cuts. And this is basically the conservative goal anyway: they don't want to cut taxes so much as redistribute them. 

    "Another important aspect of Republican tax theory has been to have a tax bases consisting largely of consumption, which would necessarily exempt taxation of interest, dividends and capital gains. Liberals generally favor the income tax and support broadening it to include forms of income that are taxed at lower rates, such as dividends and capital gains, or not taxed at all, such as employee fringe benefits."

   - See more at: http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Columns/2013/04/12/Bobby-Jindals-Failure-Ruins-Chances-of-Tax-Reform#sthash.BR6Algdb.dpuf

    Bartlett in the above linked article, however, does suggest another silver lining from Brownback's much publicized failure. Tax reform is likely to be DOA in Washington in the near future. So we won''t have to hear about that anymore-which is mostly in GOP guise about cutting  the income taxes of high earners and corporations.