Tuesday, July 11, 2017

Tax Cuts and Kansas

The [Governor] Brownback plan aimed to boost the Kansas economy, but instead led to sluggish growth, lower than expected revenues and brutal cuts to government programs.
— William G. Gale, "The Kansas tax cut experiment," Brookings Institution, July 11, 2017

In a 2014 Kansas City Star opinion piece entitled "What's the matter with Paul Krugman?" [economist Stephen] Moore responded to Krugman's opinion piece entitled "Charlatans, Cranks and Kansas." In his piece, Moore claimed that job creation had been superior in low-taxation states during the five years following the recession ending June 2009. After substantial factual errors were uncovered in Moore's opinion piece, the Kansas City Star indicated that it would no longer print Moore's work without "thorough fact checking."
Wikipedia, retrieved November 23, 2017

. . . the Brownback tax cuts didn’t emerge out of thin air. They closely followed a blueprint laid out by the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, which has also supported a series of economic studies purporting to show that tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy will promote rapid economic growth. The studies are embarrassingly bad, and the council’s Board of Scholars — which includes both Mr. Laffer and Stephen Moore of the Heritage Foundation — doesn’t exactly shout credibility. But it’s good enough for anti-government work.
— Paul Krugman, "Charlatans, Cranks and Kansas," New York Times, June 29, 2014