Been there, done that

One of the icons of right-wing fairytale economics is the Laffer Curve. It purported to show that if taxes were raised too high, the tax income would fall. Casual inspection revealed that there were no labels on the ordinate or abscissa, so it was impossible to say at what level of taxation “too high” occurred.

Nevertheless, the notion that all tax cuts are good is part of the canon of GOP religion, despite the facts that (a) the cuts never pay for themselves and (b) the result is increase debt, something the right only deplores when they’re out of power.

I was living in Missouri when the neighboring state of Kansas under Republican Gov. Brownback tested the tax cut dogma. It didn’t go well:

“In the early days of the Kansas plan, the optimism was real. Some small business owners said the pass-through exemption gave them more cash to hire. There was even a brief uptick in job growth in 2012 and early 2013, just enough for Brownback and his allies to declare the experiment a success in the making. But those gains quickly faded. The state’s job growth soon fell behind neighboring states and the national average, and by 2014, even some Republicans were quietly acknowledging the numbers didn’t add up.

 

“They were right to worry. Tax revenues fell by 11 percent in the first year alone. The state’s credit rating was downgraded multiple times. Some school districts shortened the school year by 12 days to save money. Infrastructure projects were delayed. Medicaid was squeezed so much five hospitals closed. If there was any iconic image of the cuts, it was of foster children who slept in the state offices because there wasn’t enough staff to place them in homes. 

 

“Brownback’s administration resorted to short-term fixes like highway fund raids and pension deferrals to plug growing budget holes. And while conservatives pointed to national economic headwinds, the contrast with more stable (as well as deeply conservative) neighboring states was hard to ignore.

 

“The backlash came swiftly and from within the Republican Party itself. In 2016, a wave of moderate Republicans and Democrats ousted conservative incumbents in primaries, forming a bipartisan legislative bloc strong enough to override Brownback’s vetoes. Much of the original tax-cut package was repealed by 2017. Later that year Brownback, now with the worst approval rating in the country, took a job inside the Trump administration and skipped town.”

Here we are again. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome. There’s nothing conservative about this. To paraphrase William F. Buckley, Jr.: “A conservative is someone who stands athwart the steamroller of the Trump GOP, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/07/30/nation/kansas-economic-policy-experiment-warning-gop/