Look To Kansas As Well As Connecticut

I have previously written about Connecticut's decision to increase the minimum wage, and how it effectively makes Connecticut, and other states that have taken the same step, laboratories for studying the effects of such increases on personal income, employment and the overall state of local economies.  I have not, however, written about states that have gone in a different and somewhat oppositional direction--enacting outsized tax cuts in favor of residents with high incomes.  These states have effectively become the ultimate laboratories for supply-side economics, the philosophy based on the idea that wealth is created at the top of the economic pyramid, and then "trickles down" to the rest of us.

Well, how's that working out?  If you ask folks in Kansas, one of the most reflexively conservative states in the nation, not particularly well.  Tax revenue is falling, public services are shrinking, people with little or no income are becoming increasingly desperate--and, alas, the promised economic growth is not happening.  Wealth is not trickling down in Kansas.  In all probability, it's flowing out of the state and even out of the country, to the real beneficiaries of low rates to those at the top--overseas tax shelters.

This, of course, happened at the federal level in the 1980s, when Reagan and his congressional cronies did exactly the same thing.  But they were able to sell their snake-oil in part by assuring people that state governments would benefit from all of the extra revenue that would magically spring from those tax cuts, and that local officials, closer to the problems of the people, would use that money far more wisely that Washington-based bureaucrats could or would.

We have, sadly, seen what supply-side economics have done on a national level.  Thanks to the unquestioned acceptance of this wretched philosophy by all Republicans and far too many Democrats, we are no longer the envy of the world--in fact, we are not even remotely close.  We are outranked by countries with less national wealth than ours--but who spend that wealth on all of the people, and not a fraction of them.  The Kansas "experiment," to put it politely, demonstrates the full extent of that disaster when the philosophy that makes it possible is carried all the way down the ladder of federalism.  With no level of government to cushion the blows of everyday life, we become a society that is punching itself to death.

If Kansas can find a way to learn from this, and take corrective action--i.e., electing local officials who care more about the citizens of the state then they do about their campaign contributors--it just might be a sign that their is hope for the rest of the nation.  It just might be the end to our long, national nightmare of trickle-down terror.  It just might prove Winston Churchill right when he said "You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing--after they have tried everything else."

Kansas' track record in elections doesn't inspire a lot of confidence, but it hasn't stopped me from hoping for the best.  And even if the worst is what we get instead, locally and as a nation, we will have sadly earned the destruction we have brought on ourselves.