Republicans beware: cutting taxes didn’t help Kansas

For the past five years, Kansas has been conducting a radical experiment, said Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post. The state’s governor, Sam Brownback, and the Republicancontrolled legislature have put the theory of supply-side economics to the ultimate test by slashing income tax rates, virtually eliminating taxes on small businesses and dramatically reducing red tape. The idea was that these measures would, as Brownback put it, act like a “shot of adrenaline into the heart of the Kansas economy”. In practice, though, their effect has been more like a “shot of poison”. Kansas’s job growth rate, far from shooting up, has lagged way behind national levels. The state, meanwhile, is projected to hit a $1bn deficit, and its public services have deteriorated to the point that Kansas’s Supreme Court has ruled the lack of school funding “unconstitutional”. Earlier this month, the state’s lawmakers finally decided enough was enough, overriding Brownback’s veto of the legislation “restoring taxation to sane levels”. Before this debacle, Republicans “could at least argue” that their theory had never fully been tested. Now “that excuse is gone”.

Don’t read too much into Kansas, said The Wall Street Journal (New York). The Republican lawmakers who joined with Democrats to raise Kansas’s tax rates may have had ulterior motives: they are heavily backed by teachers’ unions, who wanted to punish the governor for his education reforms, which made teachers easier to sack. As for the tax system itself, Brownback was “unlucky in his timing” – his cuts coincided with a deep slump in the agriculture and energy industries, the main drivers of Kansas’s economy. Despite this, though, unemployment in the Sunflower State remains low, at 3.7%, and the growth in small-business formation has been “considerable” since the tax cuts were enacted.

Here we go again, said Pat Garofalo on Usnews.com (Washington DC). Conservatives always try to explain away supply-side failures by arguing that the reforms weren’t quite right, or that they were stymied by underlying economic conditions. “No amount of evidence is enough to shake the belief that America is one good rate reduction away from an economic renaissance.” The big question is whether national Republicans will heed the lessons of Kansas, said Jordan Weissmann on Slate (New York). President Trump was advised by the same economists who engineered Brownback’s disastrous scheme, and he has proposed a similar programme of massive tax cuts and exemptions. Kansas has admitted to the failure of its grand experiment – but Republicans in Washington “may try to repeat it anyway”.