So much to write about, but so little time or space. On the morning of Nov. 4, America woke up to the results of the midterm elections, and to say the least, they were startling.
While nearly every Republican elected official across the United States is hand-wringing and soul-searching, my fear is that here in Tennessee, we might just double down on “Trump-nomics”.
These are the same conservative think tanks, the same great economic sages of supply-side theory and the same Laffer Curve charts that were used in Kansas, starting in May of 2012. That was when Gov. Sam Brownback signed the bill that would become known as the “Kansas Experiment.” The tax cuts were implemented Jan. 1, 2013, and built around economic models supplied by the American Legislative Exchange Council, Grover Norquist and Charles and David Koch.
The long and the short of it was that revenues fell by $700 billion in the first year, and by mid-2014, Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s cut the state’s credit rating. By 2015, Kansas had spent its operating savings and was cutting school funding by 13%, which resulted in hundreds of school closings.
By 2016, the credit agencies downgraded Kansas bonds again, and job growth stagnated as rural hospitals and clinics shut down. In February 2017 a bipartisan supermajority rolled back the tax cuts when it faced a budget shortfall of almost a billion dollars, had no savings and realized the state had borrowed $2.5 billion. Brownback resigned in 2018.