'You Better Learn Our Lesson'
The regretful Republicans of Kansas have a message for the tax-cutting Republicans of Congress: Don’t follow our lead.
If states are, as Justice Louis Brandeis famously called them, the laboratories of democracy, then Kansas’s experiment in conservative tax reform set off an explosion of red ink. Steep cuts for businesses and individuals failed to produce a promised economic boom, and busted the state’s budget instead. Now, the GOP legislators that oversaw—and ultimately cancelled—that fiscal study are increasingly worried that Washington will ignore its central finding.
A tax-reformplan from the White House and Republican congressional leaders mirrors the structure of the legislation Kansas passed, and it’s been accompanied by the same confident assurances that with economic growth. “That won’t work, so you better learn our lesson,” warned Kansas state Senator Barbara Bollier, a Republican who voted against the tax cuts originally and then fought to undo them earlier this year.
