What’s The Matter With Kansas

One of you writes: “Here is an article about the Republican plan for Kansas and its absolute failure. Isn’t insanity to do the same thing over and over again and expect different results? Therefore, the current Republican administration is insane.”

Well, yes — if the Republican goal is to help the American people, broadly.

But what if the goal is to enrich the already rich, who largely control the Republican party? They would like to see everyone do well — just as stock brokers would like to see their customers do well and chicken farmers would like to see their chickens not suffer. But for many, that is not their first priority. Their first priority, understandably, in many cases, is to see themselves do well, even if millions lose health insurance or clients have to pay high fees or chickens are treated like this.

Anyway, here’s how the article, from New York Magazine, begins:

As Voodoo Economics Collapses in Kansas, Trump Takes It National
By Jonathan Chait

In 2015, Grover Norquist, who has successfully defined unconditional opposition to taxes as the defining tenet of party orthodoxy, waxed enthusiastic about one state in particular that was leading the way for the nation. “Kansas is the future,” he told an interviewer. “Kansas is the model.” Kansas was the state where Sam Brownback, the former congressman who mentored a young staffer named Paul Ryan, implemented supply-side tax cuts that, Brownback promised, would usher in prosperity and fiscal stability.

Now Brownback’s tax cuts have failed so dramatically and incontrovertibly that . . . incredibly, a majority of the REPUBLICANS in both chambers of the state legislature voted against the tax cuts. In a new interview with Russell Berman, Norquist insists the failure in Kansas does not tell us much at all about anything.”If you’re a Republican looking for a model,” he says, “Kansas is not the model.”

One might think that the economists who designed this now-repudiated plan would have been cast out of the party, or at least embarrassed into rethinking their assumptions. Yet nothing of the sort has taken place. Stephen Moore and Art Laffer, the supply-siders who crafted the failed Kansas experiment, are also taking the lead in designing Donald Trump’s tax plan. Their op-ed urging the president to throw himself behind massively regressive, debt-financed tax cuts found its way into his hands. So profoundly did their argument impress Trump that he instructed his advisers to immediately release a tax-cut plan mirroring the recommendations made by the architects of the Kansas debacle. Now the machinery of government is in the hands of people determined to replicate a policy so unmistakably erroneous that the majority of their own party could no longer live with it.

The pattern on display in Kansas has recurred over and over in Republican politics for more than a quarter century [and] has four steps: . . .

Read the whole thing! Send it to your Republican uncle!

June is Pride Month and Trump has discontinued the White House Pride celebrations and Presidential Pride Proclamations that began in 1999 (suspended by Bush, resumed by Obama). Instead, Trump will honor pride month today by speaking at an anti-LGBT conference for the Faith and Freedom Coalition, along with the famously homophobic James Dobson.

And just for fun? If you didn’t have time to read How Trump Shifted Kids-Cancer Charity Money Into His Business in Forbes yesterday, watch Trevor Noah tell the story.

Have a great weekend.