[ed. We're not in Kansas anymore (it's much, much worse).]
Instead, the economy slows. Budgets collapse. Investors are spooked. Core services erode. Even allies defect. By the end, voters—many of whom once cheered the project—recoil, and a Democrat wins back power.
But it is an equally accurate description of what’s happened in Kansas over the past decade and a half. In 2012, after riding a Tea Party wave to victory two years earlier, Kansas Governor Sam Brownback launched what he called “a real live experiment” in conservative governance, slashing income taxes, starving the state budget, and insisting that a burst of economic growth would follow to pay for it all.
But that growth, and fresh tax revenue, never came. To fill his ballooning budget holes, Brownback squandered the state’s surplus, drained the rainy-day fund, fully privatized Medicaid, raided the state’s highway funds, decimated state agencies, and cut public education funding. When the service cutbacks started affecting people’s lives, even Brownback’s own supporters started to notice. Roads fell apart. Class sizes grew. And Brownback’s approval rating sank from 55 percent in his first month in office to 22 percent in 2016. Rather than finish out his second term, he took a job with the first Trump administration in 2017. The following year, Laura Kelly, a Democratic state legislative leader with a clear record of opposing Brownback’s reforms, won the governorship. Four years later, she was reelected, in part by tying her opponent to Brownback. To this day, she is one of the most popular governors in the country.
No political parallel is perfect, of course. Brownback didn’t have the cult following Trump does. On the other hand, the chaos Brownback’s policies caused didn’t kick in for several years, whereas Trump’s shock-and-awe actions have already rattled the country and the world.
We can’t predict the future. But we can look at Kansas. Brownback’s story offers Republicans a warning—and Democrats a possible path to victory.
A lawyer who grew up on a family farm in eastern Kansas, Brownback ran for Congress as a moderate in 1994 but quickly became one of the most radical members of Newt Gingrich’s revolution—so radical, in fact, that he refused to sign the Contract with America because it wasn’t conservative enough. As ambitious as he was ideological, he ran for the Senate two years later, won, and was reelected in 2004, both times with heavy financial support from the Wichita-based Koch brothers. In the 2008 cycle, he entered the GOP presidential primaries as a favorite of the religious right (he had grown up Methodist but converted to Catholicism during his first term in the Senate), didn’t catch fire, and soon set his sights on the Kansas governorship, which he won in 2010 with a plan to make Kansas a model for small-government revival.
In a Republican Party increasingly drawn to theatrics, Brownback was something rarer: a radical ideologue who followed through on his bluster. Whether campaigning for religious freedom abroad—he once emerged as a leading voice in Congress against the genocide in Darfur—or slashing taxes at home, Brownback brought the zeal of a missionary to every cause he took up. His theory for Kansas wasn’t new. It was the old supply-side catechism—cut taxes, shrink government, and wait for growth to swell the coffers and supercharge the economy. What distinguished Brownback was the scale of his ambition and his indifference to evidence.
Brownback went all in on that spring day in 2012. He signed a law that slashed income tax rates, eliminated taxes on pass-through business income, and made no serious effort to offset the losses. Moderate Republicans had hoped to negotiate a more tempered version of the plan in conference committee. They didn’t. Brownback got everything he wanted. His tax regime would go into effect starting New Year’s Day, 2013.
Conservative think tanks cheered the law on. Arthur Laffer—he of the infamous napkin diagram—had helped create the law. Grover Norquist gave his blessing. The Wall Street Journal trumpeted a Cato Institute report giving Brownback an A grade for “the biggest tax cut of any state in recent years relative to the size of its economy.”
The laboratory was well chosen. Kansas was—and remains—deep red. Since 1940, it has voted for every Republican presidential nominee with the exception of Lyndon Johnson. Much like the libertarian bend in the American psyche, if you tell Kansans you are going to lower their taxes, cut government expenses, and make programs more efficient, they’ll give you a great deal of leeway.
But beneath Kansas’s right-wing surface lies a persistent ideological split. The state’s Republican electorate includes both hard-line religious conservatives and a sizable bloc of moderates. That tension helps explain why Kansas has a long tradition of electing centrist Republicans—and even the occasional Democrat—to the governor’s mansion.
“Kansas is Republican,” one former state Republican politician told me, “but it’s not crazy.”
Almost immediately after the cuts went into effect, state revenues plunged. By June 2013, just six months into the new tax regime, Kansas was $338 million short of its revenue projections. Within a year, the state had lost nearly $700 million—an 11 percent drop in revenue. Credit downgrades followed. But the administration continued to insist that growth was coming. Brownback dismissed economists’ warnings and suppressed internal projections that contradicted the party line.
Job growth didn’t materialize. Brownback had promised 100,000 new private-sector jobs. By 2014, a year into the “experiment,” the state had added fewer than 20,000—well behind national trends and trailing neighboring Missouri and Colorado. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the year the cuts took effect, the Kansas economy shrank, even as the national economy grew. Then, in 2014, the state’s economy grew but still lagged the national average. By 2015, Kansas’s real GDP was growing at half the rate of the national economy. According to the CBPP, five of the previous six years before the tax cut, Kansas’s economy had grown faster than the nation’s as a whole.
What did expand—quickly and predictably—was income tax avoidance. Pass-through entities multiplied practically overnight as doctors, lawyers, and accountants restructured to avoid paying state income taxes. “I’m making out like a bandit,” one attorney told The Kansas City Star. “And it’s completely unfair,” he complained, because his secretary, like most Kansans, still paid full freight.
Before a critical mass of voters caught on, Brownback’s administration was able to paper over the fiscal collapse with budget chicanery. It drained the state’s budget surplus, moved money from the highway fund, cut the state’s pension fund contributions, and tightened eligibility requirements for programs assisting the poor.
The result was a slow bleed: Agencies were hollowed out gradually, and the most vulnerable Kansans suffered, but the daily lives of most voters hadn’t yet been directly affected by the time the 2014 elections rolled around. As Ashley All, a veteran Democratic operative in Kansas, told me, “They were able to conceal the scale of the crisis just long enough.” Brownback squeaked by to reelection, aided in part by a well-timed reminder that his opponent had visited a strip club 16 years earlier.
It wasn’t until after the election that Brownback was forced to take actions that shocked average voters. Two weeks into his second term, another round of credit rating downgrades further raised the state’s borrowing costs and led to more budget cuts in education and infrastructure. Brownback slashed $45 million from school budgets to fill the growing hole. That forced some school districts, already cash strapped from the governor’s previous cuts, to begin sending students home at two p.m. Others canceled classes on Fridays or started summer vacation early. Working parents, left in a lurch, had to scramble to find child care. “We felt we didn’t have a choice,” said Janet Neufeld, superintendent of the Twin Valley School District, which then served 590 students in eastern Kansas. The district ended its academic year 12 days early that year. “It’s not good for kids, it’s not good for families,” Neufeld told Bloomberg. “There have been times when things were tight, but this is the absolute worst I’ve ever seen it,” Mike Sanders, superintendent of the Skyline School District, said at the time. Even parents in districts that didn’t impose such drastic service cuts read or heard about them in the media and worried that their schools would be next.
Meanwhile, the governor shelved 24 highway expansion and modernization projects, including ones he’d campaigned on, such as a $29 million widening of a dangerous 24-mile stretch of K-177 known for rollover accidents and blind curves. During Brownback’s first term, almost 50 percent of all highway fatalities recorded in Kansas occurred on roads like K-177: two-lane highways with no controlled access. “New Budget Deal Postpones Upgrades on Lethal Two-Lane Roads, Harrowing Intersections,” read a Topeka Capital-Journal headline. Republican legislators joined Democrats in blasting the broken promise.
And then came the great irony. Having promised sweeping tax relief, but facing a $400 million shortfall and another credit downgrade, Brownback signed the largest tax increase in Kansas history. Yet rather than place the burden on high-income individuals who had benefited from his first-term reductions, the new law raised the state sales tax, including on groceries, and hiked cigarette taxes, disproportionately penalizing middle- and lower-income Kansans. Conservative lawmakers wept as they voted affirmatively. (Cue the world’s smallest violin.) Brownback insisted that it wasn’t a tax hike—“Look at the totality,” he said. “Overall, it’s still a net tax cut.” But even Grover Norquist called it what it was: a violation of his “Never raise taxes” mandate, and one that particularly punished the poor.
“It wasn’t abstract anymore,” Ashley All, who served as communications director for Laura Kelly’s 2018 campaign, told me. “Parents were paying extra at the grocery store and seeing 30 kids in a classroom. People were noticing delays on roads. You didn’t need to follow politics whatsoever to understand something had gone very wrong.”
The experiment had obviously failed. But the governor wasn’t done defending it. He blamed “media elitists,” “leftists,” and “liberal outside groups” for misleading the public. “Some at the local Missouri-based paper in Kansas,” he warned in bold-faced type in one fund-raising letter, had “even taken to openly rooting for the Kansas economy to fail.”
by Nate Weisberg, Washington Monthly | Read more:
Image: AP
[ed. The real story is that people keep falling for the same old scams.]
