Quote:Just wanted to get everyone's input on this.  I'm pretty sure everyone know's my position on this.  But I want to make sure that everyone also understands that based on the tax cuts that the good Governor rammed down the throats of the hard working Kansians, they now also have a school budget fiasco that needs to be addressed....  

 

Here's the link:  https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/...ich-worked

 

<p style="color:rgb(51,51,64);font-family:Tiempos, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;font-size:17px;">Kansas has lagged Nebraska in job creation since 2011, and the gap has widened since late 2014. Instead of adding the 25,000 jobs a year that Brownback promised, Kansas actually lost 5,400 jobs over the 12 months ending in February.

<p style="color:rgb(51,51,64);font-family:Tiempos, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;font-size:17px;">This doesn't look great for Kansas. The overall gap is only slightly smaller, and the growing divergence in performance since 2014 is still apparent. That could be because a higher percentage of Kansans than Nebraskans work in manufacturing, and the current global economic slowdown has been tough on manufacturers. Again, Nebraska isn't a perfect comparison. But overall, while I think it's too early to label the Kansas experiment a failure, it hasn't delivered impressive results on the job front.

Then again, how could any reasonable person have expected that it would? When Brownback took over, Kansas was a state with a below-average tax burden in a part of the country that wasn't growing very fast. The Midwest remains the region of the U.S. with the slowest 5-year population growth, according to the Census Bureau. The tax cuts may eventually knock Kansas a few rungs down in the tax rankings (the most recent data available is from 2012), but by themselves they're not going to turn it into Texas -- a fast-growing, low-tax state that Brownback has often named as an economic model. In the meantime, the damage being inflicted on the state's educational system may begin to exercise an economic drag of its own. Tax rates matter, but so do lots of other things.

This is not a good time to be a rural manufacturing state. Unless you have basically no corporate tax rate you won't out compete Texas or even Ga. Nafta going away would help, but it takes years. The US economy overall has not been good since '06. Its a palpable difference. Yes it is better now than 2009, but today is not better than 10 years ago. Sometimes it feels like a dog eat dog world.

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