When Sam Brownback became governor of Kansas, he was all fired up with a simple yet radical idea: Cut taxes and businesses will expand and the economy will grow. State revenues dropped dramatically. School funding suffered deep cuts. Social services of all kinds lost money. And now the legislature is repudiating Brownback’s tax cuts. They voted to increase taxes. Brownback, having learned nothing, vetoed the budget. The legislature overrode his veto.
Farewell, Governor Brownback. And good riddance to failed ideas.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Amen!
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Myth making by both parties at every level of governance: “Cut taxes and businesses will expand and the economy will grow.”
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Men like the Koch’s have lots of puppets in government and media.
IMO, Hechinger’s Report which boasts itself as “independent” is like Fox’s “fair and balanced”.
Hechinger’s (funded by Gates) wrote about the Gates-funded Frontier Set, in the NYT on June 7. No surprise that the edit cutting room floor got any possible concerns about academic freedom or university independence. And, as expected, the boogey man that makes corporate profit-taking in education necessary is-you guessed it- the public pensions, much loathed by the Koch’s and much coveted for privatization by Wall Street. Deprivation of America’s middle class and poor and the institutions that they created to give their fellow citizens, a hand-up, is unrelated to concentrated wealth and the Koch’s political apparatus, starving common goods of funding.
May there be a plague on the minions of the rich.
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WELL said.
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You are exactly right. Recently, I read Jane Mayer’s book DARK MONEY. The Guardian, The New Yorker, and The Economist have published well researched articles about Koch Industries, Mercer, Gates, Theil, Zuckerberg, and (Goldman Sachs) Wall Street. I hope the US (Western Europe) hasn’t crossed the Rubicon in terms of saving our liberal democracies. Since I’ve retired from teaching, I have been reading about Putin and his network of disinformation. It’s amazing how many bots are being deployed in social media sites. On May 30th, Twitter noted that Trump’s twitter feed exploded with new followers. Right now twitter has posted that 51% of Trump’s followers and posters are bots as opposed to 21% of Obama’s followers are bots. It’s like waking up and finding out I’ve been living in Plato’s Cave or Wonderland or The Matrix. Thank you for your post.
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Concentrated wealth has created uncertain and dangerous times. I hope the police recognize the threat that the richest 0.1% pose to them and that they side with the people in what is, inevitably coming. The 5 richest men in the world each have wealth equal to 750,000,000 people. They are the few and, we are the many.
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Kansans have discovered that gutting the public schools also hurt the private sector: (duh!)
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“But looking at the bigger picture, the state of the state, Ken Wagner grew ever more uncomfortable. Diane Wagner could see it, too, in the way education spending flattened out. She didn’t see how, if schools were suffering, any out-of-state businesses would move to Kansas.
“ ‘How are you going to attract a company to bring 1,000 employees to the state of Kansas when our schools don’t have the reputation they used to have?’ she said.
‘ … In the end you have a responsibility to support our school system. You’ve got a responsibility to support all the funding on roads and infrastructure. … It was well past time that taxes needed to be reinstated.’”
Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article155431604.html#storylink=cpy
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So now maybe in the new spirit of bipartisanship after the ball game tonight . We will see bipartisan agreement on tax cuts . like eliminating the death tax on multi millionaires .
Then we can bring home 3 trillion un- taxed in corporate profits to buy back stock shares
and increase CEO compensation.
Yup bipartisan spirit because the rhetoric is to hot. (LOL) I would be very happy to see nothing done for 2 years.
How much were taxes cut in Kansas, compared to how much those cuts will be reversed ?
Clinton raised taxes all the way to 39% but they had been at 61% before Reagan gutted them . Reagan eliminated the special rate for capital gains making gains the same as income. At the new lower rate. Clinton once again lowered the gains rate while he raised the income tax a few points . I am sure the billionaires were crying all the way to the bank.
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I agree. I don’t care if Congress passes any of their so-called healthcare plans or their tax reforms or infrastructure privatization plans. Every day some kind of protection is gutted in favor of profiteering.
Most people don’t pay any taxes on their inheritance. The cut-off is a little over $5 million. So any American citizen could inherit between five and six million dollars tax free if that’s what been left to them. If you inherit property and sell it, you may have to pay capital gains if the property sells for more than the original price, but you only pay for the profit you made– not the entire cost of the property. The “death tax” doesn’t affect most small businesses and family farms. The lies about the estate tax are just another con on the American people.
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Kansas, one of the most ardent xtian fundie populations in the country. Think Wesboro Baptist.
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John Kasich actually did the same thing. Less drastic, but it’s the same idea.
Tax revenue didn’t meet (fantasy) projections and now he has a billion dollar hole to fill.
He’ll take it out of public schools. They’re the reliable piggy bank to tap when theories meet reality.
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Daily, Kasich’s team adds to its hypocrisy. Peggy Lehner blathers about teacher accountability but, apparently, feels no shame when
Kasich’s appointed trustees to Wright State University are fire-proof. The Trustees admitted to “sleeping at the wheel” for years while the university ran up the largest deficit in Ohio higher ed history. Currently, two high ranking, high salary administrators are on paid leave, a situation that has been going on for more than two years. Wright State is under investigations at the state and federal levels. There are lawsuits filed by vendors and contractors who hurl insults at the top management that Trustees selected (WSU’s president- also fire-proof).
One of the Trustees resigned after a Wright State employee, a visa worker, was found working at her business. Another Trustee signed off on his son’s employment at Wright State at a salary of $125,000.
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“Cyber charter schools are meant to be an accessible alternative to traditional schooling, but one state senator wants to make them a privilege that can be revoked at any time.
The bill, proposed by Sen. David Argall, R-Schuylkill, would require students who are consistently underperforming in a cyber charter school to return to a brick-and-mortar school, according to a May 31 memorandum.
The bill is in its very early stages and is far from making it to a vote, according to Argall.”
That’s nice. The only time GOP lawmakers pay any attention to public schools is when they’re relying on them as a “back up” for choice schools.
What happens when ‘ol reliable isn’t there for them to use?
They absolutely take public school students and parents for granted. It’s like we exist to stand ready to pick up the risk on these experiments.
The biggest single problem my school superintendent has is students churning in and out of cybercharters. It creates chaos in her schools. No one cares. Her students apparently have no rights and no voice in this “debate”. They’re just the disfavored default, the “status quo” schools that all these bold innovators sneer at.
Thank goodness we have them! Ed reform failures would be really catastrophic without them!
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