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the intro of this article lays out his credentials, and initially appearances are that he is an ideal conservative governor.
ouch.
maybe some one can explain what has gone wrong? because it looks like a conservative governor has not been good for kansas so far.
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-04-17/kansas-governor-brownbacks-lab-for-steep-tax-and-budget-cuts
Sam Brownback has been a Tea Partier since before the Tea Party was born. When he became governor of Kansas in 2011, he set about making the state a testing ground for conservative principles, including cutting funding for some public education and the eventual elimination of the state’s income tax. “Our new pro-growth tax policy will be like a shot of adrenaline into the heart of the Kansas economy,” he wrote in a 2012 op-ed. He predicted cutting taxes would “pave the way to the creation of tens of thousands of new jobs, bring tens of thousands of people to Kansas, and help make our state the best place in America to start and grow a small business.”
The Kansas experiment attracted the attention of both conservatives and liberals around the country, who saw it as an acid test for the Tea Party agenda. Brownback, a former U.S. senator who briefly ran for president in 2007, crept up the long list of dark horse candidates for the 2016 Republican nomination.
The state income tax cut that Brownback signed in 2012 was the nation’s biggest, in percentage terms, since the 1990s. That was a very different era, when states were able to cut taxes steeply because boom times had left their coffers overflowing. Brownback made his cuts in the face of economic weakness, not strength. The first phase reduced the top rate from 6.45 percent to 4.9 percent while immediately eliminating income tax on business profits from partnerships and limited liability corporations that are passed through to individuals. A 2013 measure put the income tax top rate on track to decline to 3.9 percent by 2018.
The most authoritative study of the effect of these measures is a January report by the Kansas Legislative Research Department, a nonpartisan arm of the legislature. It found that revenue isn’t keeping up with expenses even after cuts in spending on K-12 schools, colleges, libraries, local health departments, courts, and welfare. If nothing changed, the research department’s numbers show, the state’s general fund would have a shortfall of about $900 million by fiscal year 2019, or 14 percent of expenses that year. The state’s constitution requires a balanced budget, so either taxes will have to go back up or spending will have to come down even more. “The tax cuts don’t pay for themselves,” says Duane Goossen, who served as state budget director under both Republican and Democratic governors. “That just is not happening.”
ouch.
maybe some one can explain what has gone wrong? because it looks like a conservative governor has not been good for kansas so far.
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-04-17/kansas-governor-brownbacks-lab-for-steep-tax-and-budget-cuts