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The Great Kansas Tea Party Disaster - Excellent Rolling Stone Article.
Last edited Tue Oct 28, 2014, 01:02 PM - Edit history (1)
This article will certainly let one know why Kansas has been failing on most cylinders and why Brownback and Roberts might well be shown the door, which they certainly deserve. This is a long article, but well worth a read!
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-great-kansas-tea-party-disaster-20141023
Four years ago, when Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback first took office, you might've wondered if these people, on some subliminal level, actually wanted to be humiliated by a filthy-minded liberal activist looking to add a new "santorum" to Urban Dictionary. As a senator and a failed presidential candidate, Brownback was already one of the nation's most prominent social conservatives, "God's Senator," in the words of a 2006 Rolling Stone profile. But Brownback turned out to be even more radical when it came to economic policy. In 2012, he enacted the largest package of tax cuts in Kansas history, essentially transforming his state into a lab experiment for extreme free-market ideology. The results (disastrous) have reduced the governor to making appearances at grim strip malls like this one in a desperate attempt to salvage his re-election bid.
That word, "experiment," has come to haunt Brownback as the data rolls in. The governor promised his "pro-growth tax policy" would act "like a shot of adrenaline in the heart of the Kansas economy," but, instead, state revenues plummeted by nearly $700 million in a single fiscal year, both Moody's and Standard & Poor's downgraded the state's credit rating, and job growth sagged behind all four of Kansas' neighbors. Brownback wound up nixing a planned sales-tax cut to make up for some of the shortfall, but not before he'd enacted what his opponents call the largest cuts in education spending in the history of Kansas.
Brownback hardly stands alone among the class of Republican governors who managed to get themselves elected four years ago as part of the anti-Obama Tea Party wave by peddling musty supply-side fallacies. In Ohio, Gov. John Kasich – whose press releases claim he's wrought an "Ohio Miracle" – has presided over a shrinking economy, this past July being the 21st consecutive month in which the state's job growth has lagged behind the national average. In Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker, whose union-busting inadvertently helped kick off the Occupy movement, cut taxes by roughly $2 billion – yet his promise to create 250,000 new private-sector jobs during his first term has fallen about 150,000 jobs short, and forecasters expect the state to face a $1.8 billion budgetary shortfall by mid-2017. A recent analysis by the Detroit Free Press, meanwhile, laid out how the tax policies of Gov. Rick Snyder, a wealthy entrepreneur who campaigned in Michigan as a nerdy technocrat, have resulted in businesses paying less ($1.7 billion less per year, to be exact), individuals paying more ($900 million per year) and – here's the kicker – job growth slowing every year since Snyder's cuts have been enacted.
Brownback's policies have been so unpopular, in fact, that a group of more than 100 moderate Republicans, nearly all of them former or current state officeholders, have publicly backed his Democratic opponent, state Rep. Paul Davis, who, until the race's recent tightening, had been leading consistently in polls. Calling themselves Republicans for Kansas Values, the moderates released a manifesto of sorts, which reads in part, "We are Republicans in the historical and traditional sense of the word. Yet in today's political climate in Kansas, traditional Republican values have been corrupted by extremists, claiming to be agents of change. It is a faction which hides behind the respected Republican brand in an effort to defund and dismantle our state's infrastructure. . . . The policies [they] espouse are radical departures. . . . They jeopardize the economy and endanger our children's future with reckless abandon. . . . We reject their extremist agenda."
17 replies
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Better change "Rolling Stones" to "Rolling Stone" in your subject line.
The best sentence in the article:
As John Weaver, a Republican strategist who worked on both of John McCain's presidential campaigns, told The Washington Post, "He's basically furniture in the Senate. You could give the average Kansan 24 hours to come up with something Pat Roberts has done [and] even the crickets would be standing there befuddled."
And the people of Kansas adore Bob Dole. And even hard core Democrats tend to like him. Another great line in the article:
During the question-and-answer period, when someone asks Dole if he thinks Palin might run for president, Dole simply growls, "I hope not."
Well worth a click through, as are most Rolling Stone articles these days.
