After the 2010 elections, when anti-tax Tea Party Republicans swept many states, they had a chance to perform a radical experiment. They bet that slashing corporate taxes and individual taxes would be a shot in the arm to their economy, creating new jobs and more revenue. They were wrong. The deep tax cuts reduced public revenues, harmed public services, especially education, and did not produce economic growth.
This article in The Nation explains it.
“Oklahoma isn’t typically a big-spending state, even under Democratic governors. But until eight years ago, Democrats held most statewide offices and maintained some power in the Legislature. Then, in 2010, a number of Tea Party candidates were elected to office. The GOP increased its majorities in the Legislature and, after winning the governor’s race, controlled the entire statehouse for the first time in Sooner history.
“Oklahoma wasn’t the only state that got a fresh coat of red paint. Republicans had full control of just 14 state legislatures in 2010, while Democrats held power in 27. After the November elections that year, Republicans held majority power in 25, including Oklahoma.
“The newly empowered Republicans didn’t sit on their hands; they got to work implementing an extreme anti-tax Tea Party agenda. But now the damage those decisions have wreaked is becoming abundantly clear—not just in underfunded schools and crumbling infrastructure, but in lagging economies and angry constituents. States are supposed to be the “laboratories of democracy,” in the famous phrase of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, putting new ideas to the test. But the Tea Party experiment of drastically cutting taxes in the hopes of sparking economic growth has blown up in lawmakers’ faces.
“Oklahoma legislators had already reduced income taxes back in the mid-2000s, and an amendment added to the state constitution in 1992 makes it all but impossible to raise taxes, requiring approval from a three-quarters supermajority of lawmakers. Lowering them requires only a simple majority.
“The Tea Party experiment of drastically cutting taxes in the hopes of sparking economic growth has blown up in lawmakers’ faces.
“But the politics after 2011 were different. “The Republicans swept,” said David Blatt, executive director of the Oklahoma Policy Institute, a progressive think tank. “We never had a Republican governor with a Republican legislature.”
“State lawmakers came “out of the gate in 2011 with a pretty regressive, large-scale tax-cut plan,” said Meg Wiehe, deputy director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), a nonprofit, tax-focused research group. Led by Governor Fallin, the Oklahoma GOP wanted to scrap the income tax entirely—a plan that was the brainchild of conservative economist Arthur Laffer, the self-described “father of supply-side economics.”
If we lived in a rational world, everyone would agree that we learned an important lesson. Draconian tax cuts benefit the wealthy and do not produce economic growth. They require government to starve essential services. Unfortunately we do not live in a rational world.
Teachers and parents are angry. Will their anger suffice to throw the bums out?
Posted at Oped News (OEN) where members get a look at what is really happening in this nation: https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/How-Red-States-Slashed-Tax-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Budget_Budget-Cuts_Diane-Ravitch_Economic-180708-278.html#comment705842.
Go,BECOME A MEMBER r and comment there, not just here, so the general public across the nation, can hear teachers talk about the devastation!
I posted this comment:
From the report ( links below)
” The public does not realize that every dollar spent for a charter or a voucher is a dollar subtracted from public schools. No state has added extra dollars for charters or vouchers. They simply take money away from public schools, which most students attend
Charters and vouchers are a substitute for fully funding our public schools.
As we saw in the dramatic wave of teacher strikes this past spring, our public schools, which educate 85% of all students, are being systematically underfunded.
Privatization is diverting money from public schools, where 85% of our children attend.
The Network for Public Education and the Schott Foundation for Public Education released a report grading the states on their support for public education and documenting the extent to which states are allowing the privatization of public funds.
The report can be found here. http://schottfoundation.org/report/grading-the-states
It will be regularly updated to reflect changing events.”
“The livestream of the press briefing, featuring John Jackson, president of the Schott Foundation, Carol Burris of the Network for Public Education, and me is on the Schott Foundation Facebook page. https://m.facebook.com/SchottFoundation/
Here’s a piece about the political candidates wealthy ed reformers are supporting in state elections:
https://apnews.com/96cbd342573844249c7d9d9a6908119b
Charters and vouchers. No ideas or plans for supporting or improving public schools.
Public schools aren’t even mentioned except in comparison to charter and private schools.
This is why public schools have fared so poorly under ed reform political leadership- our schools aren’t valued. They’re rarely even mentioned.
Public schools are the dead last priority in the ed reform “movement”- and it shows in states they control. It shouldn’t surprise anyone. They tell us this every time they run for office when they ignore public schools and promote the schools they prefer- charters and private schools.
Trump is bragging about how great the ‘wonderful Christmas present tax break for the middle class’ is going. He lies and has no culture, just a love of overly gaudy and gold. How much damage will have to occur before the GOP gets blamed for nothing working? Too many people don’t want ‘those people’ to get anything even if it means they themselves have nothing. How many average or poor people believe that this tax cut was ‘an economic miracle’?
This was posted by the WH:
……………..
‘Six months ago, we unleashed an economic miracle’
“The biggest tax cuts in American history,” President Trump said Friday at a celebration of December’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. “It’s my great honor to welcome you back to the White House to celebrate six months of new jobs, bigger paychecks, and keeping more of your hard-earned money where it belongs, in your pocket or wherever else you want to spend it.”
The results are in: The economy is booming and confidence is soaring. Fifty-four percent of Americans rate the economy as good or excellent, the highest ever recorded by CNBC. Businesses repatriated $300 million held overseas in early 2018—another record.
This economic miracle gets less press than it should. Why? Because the tax-cuts boom is proving the President’s alarmist critics flat-out wrong. “What has been sold as a job creator and wage booster will, of course, do little of either,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) claimed. “We are very probably looking at a global recession, with no end in sight,” liberal economist Paul Krugman said the day after President Trump’s election.
See the numbers: 6 months in, tax reform delivers an economic resurgence.
Video: President Trump Delivers Remarks Celebrating the Six Month Anniversary of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act
The White House
Published on Jun 29, 2018
ANYONE using basic common sense might see that, much like in 1927 and 28, when the government’s work appears to be only in making the rich overwhelmingly richer, there is no deeper, stable economic foundation. Suddenly one day the bubble bursts, and those who have passively played the game end up with more and more of NOTHING. “We are very probably looking at a global recession, with no end in sight…”
A second tax cut is in the works with the PR spin that it will held the middle class and small businesses. The timing will be o n ether mark to brag before the elections. Few will remember that the first tax cut did not do anything great except for the wealthy.
Laura:” Few will remember that the first tax cut did not do anything great except for the wealthy.”
It’s hard to figure out the loyal Republican mind. I’ve posted comments on other sites and gotten blasted. Some of my comments are definitely ‘fake news’. That was what I got back yesterday after stating that Trump was a bully.
The Republican Congress probably also will politely temporarily ‘forget’ that they want to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. These programs will have to be cut sometime in the future because of lack of money to sustain the ‘greedy takers’ in our country.
should be help not held
Here’s ed reform efforts at the federal level:
The House education committee will host a hearing on “The Power of Charter Schools: Promoting Opportunity for America’s Students”
You cannot imagine a event devoted to promoting public schools, because it would never, ever happen in the US Congress.
Charters and vouchers are the priority, so much so that public schools are never mentioned as valuable or worthwhile in their own right but are simply used as a political device to promote charters and vouchers.
Public school families have little or no political representation in states ed reformers control and the federal government.
Your schools are doing so poorly under ed reform-dominated government because ed reformers don’t advocate on behalf of public schools. If they are in power long enough you see a collapse of the public systems, like in West Virginia and Arizona and Oklahoma. Public schools had to SHUT DOWN in West Virginia before they could get the attention of state lawmakers. THAT’S how little anyone in the ed reform “movement” cared about them.
Cutting state budgets without caring about the consequences is foolhardy conservative myopia. Too many representatives on both sides of the aisle no longer represent the interests of their constituents. They represent special interests. This link shows the interests that are pulling the strings in several mostly red states.https://news.littlesis.org/2018/05/14/a-guide-to-the-corporations-that-are-de-funding-public-education-opposing-striking-teachers/
Of course trickle down economics and endlessly cutting taxes is a sham, bogus and a disaster waiting to happen. Reagan cut taxes on the rich and tripled the national debt. Bush, the war monger, slashed taxes on the rich and put everything else on the national credit card, including his two unnecessary wars of occupation and the massive military spending. Bush skyrocketed the deficits and was the only president to cut taxes during war(s)time. I remember Tom DeLay saying that the most important thing to do during a time of war was to cut taxes. Really?! I would have thought that the most important thing was to win the wars. DeLay would utter his economic blatherings in between his pseudo-religious red herrings; if DeLay was an example of religiosity, then I’m Pope Pius XX. Here we go again with Trump and the far right wing cult otherwise known as the GOP. Cutting taxes on the filthy rich and massive spending on the military while going on a deregulating spree. I hope I am wrong, but we are being set up for another financial meltdown which will crush the lower economic classes. How many times do we have to go through this before we develop a brain? As long as the GOP is in thrall to the fanatics, we will never learn from our historical lessons.
Trump’s reckless tax scam will dwarf Reagan’s deficit and put all the social safety nets on the chopping block. It’s a complete historical blind spot.
I fear that this is NOT a blind spot: the GOP wants to not only undo the work of Obama, they want to undo the work of FDR and especially LBJ.
Their goal is to undo the New Deal and restore the roaring 20s. Oblivious to what followed.
Reading this article, I get the impression that the next big change in this country will be led by K-12 teachers and their students. Just think of the teacher strikes and the antigun movements. This is a change from the past, when higher education seemed to be the place that pump fresh blood into this sick body.
You accurately conclude that we are not living in a rational world, especially when our “debates” consist of tweets.
But here’s a conundrum I struggle with: if we rely on ANGER to throw the bums out, we’re feeding into the irrationality and polarization that got us where we are today… yet if we have to wait for those whose self-interests are being compromised to wake up to reality we’ll have no safety nets, an environment that is completely destroyed, and a truly dysfunctional government.
I believe we are reaping the whirlwind of President Reagan’s aphorism that “government is the problem.” Those who are voting against their self-interest are doing so because they believe that paying taxes to the government feeds an oppressive “Deep State” that confiscates their hard earned money and gives it to undeserving welfare recipients and bureaucrats who dream up regulations that thwart economic growth. I think those of us who seek more funds for public education need to restore the public’s faith in government by avoiding “us vs. them” arguments…. which is tough when we are led by a political party that is intent on destroying the government that can solve problems we face.
Public education advocates could help get us out of the mess we’re in by educating voters that in a democracy WE are the government and by emphasizing that democracy depends on deliberation, the thoughtful consideration of ideas. Democracy is slow and inefficient but it is far better than any other form of government…. and like clean air and water, social security and Medicare, we’ll miss it when it’s gone.
Yikes!