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Repugs proving they can govern!
back on topic..
Source: Reuters
Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/kansas-averts-...-business.htmlWhile still unable to agree on a budget, Kansas lawmakers on Saturday averted a furlough of thousands of non-essential employees by passing a bill defining all employees as essential, officials said.
Republican Governor Sam Brownback said in a statement posted on his website that he will sign the bill so that state services can continue working uninterrupted.
The Kansas House and Senate have been in session for more than two weeks past the usual adjournment date while trying to make up a $400 million deficit for the budget year that begins on July 1.
Income tax cuts engineered by Brownback and approved by the Republican-dominated legislature three years ago have created revenue shortfalls. The governor said the cuts would help Kansas compete with bordering Missouri and other states to draw business.
Repugs proving they can govern!
Krazy Kruz is a religious extremist, running for the Presidency of a hate-filled Jesus.
Voted no for blue-state Sandy aid, but said politics shouldn't get in the way of aid for his insanely red state TX.
I'll his academic record says he's very smart (unlike Gohmert or the TX Bartons), so the he spews is the worst kind of hateful, evil demagoguery, right down there with Beck and Alex Jones.
and he's a very hard working FRESHMAN Senator:
"On one side of the spectrum in the Senate there is Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, who has not missed a vote since taking office in 1997. At the opposite end are Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida.
The two Republican presidential candidates' attendance records when it comes to Senate votes and attending hearings are some of lowest in the chamber, with Cruz being especially negligent as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Cruz has missed the majority of committee hearings and now ranks 97th in the first three months of this year in showing up for roll call votes on the floor.
According to a report from Politico late last month, Cruz missed out on discussions about Afghanistan, the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, spending cuts, military readiness and the appropriate level of compensation for the troops.
Cruz was also the only senator absent on Wednesday when the Senate voted 99-0 to pass a compromise human trafficking bill that ended a contentious fight over federal abortion funding restrictions that had stalled the confirmation vote on attorney general nominee Loretta Lynch."
http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/pol...s-floor-votes/
yep, Krazy Kruz doing the freshman senator's grunt work he was elected to do by ing Krazy TX rednecks, racists, Bible humpers.
Kansas lawmakers raise state sales taxes to balance budget
Source: Reuters
Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/kansas-lawmake...-business.htmlKansas lawmakers raised the state sales tax on Friday to help balance the budget and cover a projected $400 million deficit in the wake of three years of income tax cuts pushed by Governor Sam Brownback.
The increase in the sales tax to 6.50 percent, from the current 6.15 percent, would raise $400 million in revenue. Taxes on cigarettes would increase by 50 cents per pack to $1.29.
Brownback, a Republican, praised the bill in a statement shortly after it passed but stopped short of saying he will sign it. The governor on Thursday threatened to make steep spending cuts on Monday if lawmakers did not pass the budget after meeting for nearly three weeks past their usual adjournment.
"This bill keeps the state on a path of economic growth, creating well-paying jobs that benefit all Kansans," said Brownback. "It continues our transition from taxes on productivity to consumption-based taxes and provides a mechanism for reducing income tax rates for all our citizens."
if it's a regressive tax, then its ok.....
What can we learn from Kansas?
http://www.marke ch.com/story/wha...sas-2015-06-10Three years ago, Kansas’ conservative government — led by Republican Gov. Sam Brownback — made a bet: cut taxes on the wealthy, and the economy will grow enough to make up for the lost revenue. Spoiler alert: it hasn’t worked out — as I write this, the Legislature is frantically trying to close a $350 million budget hole — but the policy has failed in an informative direction.
There are two clear takeaways: first, supply-side economics didn’t even work with the deck stacked in its favor, and second, we’re seeing what happens when supply-side tax cuts on the rich fail to produce badly needed revenue. The end result is that the wealthy get to keep their tax cuts and everyone else gets to close the gap.
The idea that states are laboratories for democracy has always suffered from a rarely acknowledged weakness: because such policy experiments take place at the state level, the results are often useless to policy makers in other contexts. This isn’t universally true; some of the best research in America is being done by organizations that help local governments design policies so researchers can see if the policy worked after the fact.
However, a lot of the “experiments” we hear about are too poorly set up to “prove” anything.
Wealthy Kansans got a tax cut that blew up the budget, then the rest of the state got tax increases to help fill the hole. The state also cut funding for schools and higher education, among other public needs, possibly by so much it violates the state cons ution.
believe it or not, that's a selling point. people hate government, period.
contempt for public priorities like education and health care reflects that.
Last edited by Winehole23; 06-13-2015 at 08:43 AM. Reason: noun/verb agreement
how many "govt haters" EVER have to "deal with" govt other than paying taxes? the "hate govt" / "lets destroy govt" propaganda is a VRWC strategy to up govt, to make people hate govt (cut $1B from IRS, then people this year could't get IRS to answer the phones), so the VRWC can eliminate the only power than can restrain the VRWC.
depends on whether you're talking about Federal or the State level. the fingers of the State rummage much more thoroughly than the Federal ones, once all the fees, fines and penalties have been tallied.how many "govt haters" EVER have to "deal with" govt other than paying taxes?
short answer, everybody deals with it. everybody is touched administratively by state power in some way or another.
America’s worst governor backs down: Sam Brownback’s Kansas tax cutting model tarnished after sales tax raised
http://www.salon.com/2015/06/14/kans...es_tax_raised/
Of course! Raise the highly regressive sales tax to screw the 47% while leaving BigCorp and 1% tax cuts untouched.
And there's AG Kobach, frustrated that local DAs didn't sue any fraudulent voters, will now bring the suits himself, with severe penalties "IF" convicted. Pure voter suppression via intimidation.
One thing I can assure you of, is that AIG's regulators are paying a LOT more attention to their investment portfolio and goings on in the holding company system.
Remember this isn't the federal government overseeing it, it is state regulators. Banks get their choice of who regulates them, and they generally organize so they get the least obtrusive obtrusive agency, a "race to the bottom" of regulators. Insurance companies don't have that luxury.
The thing you are missing that is baffling you is the interlinking of assets, and systemic risk.
If you don't backstop one, you simply get a series of dominoes that fall, one after the other, in a rather cataclysmic self-feeding cycle.
Problem still hasn't been solved, but if you want to put citizens' well-being first and foremost, keeping the banking system from imploding is right up there.
Saw that.
Essentially they cut taxes on the wealthy (income based) .. and raised it on poor people (sales tax based).
Both AIG and GE Capital were tagged "systemically important" after the last crash and are being actively regulated by the FSOC, run by the treasury. Same with banks. But there are legitimate questions as to whether the overseers, state or federal, can actually prevent these companies from gambling again if there's nothing written in law to stop them.
I'm pessimistic that the powers that be are interested. It's borderline impossible, IMO, that the Treasury and Fed weren't aware of the bubble that ended up bursting in '08. It's possible they didn't think it would get THAT out of hand, but there's no way they were not privvy of what was going on.
Really interesting separation of powers issue starting to percolate in Kansas, too, related to Brownback's economic policies in a sense:
Governor Brownback and his legislative allies have enacted legislation that ties the funding of the Kansas judiciary to its rulings on challenges to another bill -- if the Supreme Court sides with Brownback and upholds the law (which basically stripped the Supreme Court of significant powers with regard to the oversight of the lower courts), the judiciary will keep its funding, but if the Supreme Court strikes down Brownback's law, the judiciary loses its funding and will functionally cease to exist.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/us...wers.html?_r=0
It's described similarly in the Wall Street Journal:
http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2015/06/05/...icial-rulings/
The efforts to divest the Supreme Court of power appear to have arisen from the fact that the Court refused to just go along with the tax cuts and reductions in spending, ruling in 2014 that school funding could not be decreased as much as it had:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/...control-kansas
Obviously, if the executive and legislative can effectively tie the funding of the judiciary to obtaining particular results on favored pieces of legislation, the judiciary loses its independence and cannot function as a check on the other branches, which is to say that it cannot perform the very function that it is fundamentally intended to serve. I'm not here to say that Brownback's laws should or should not be upheld; that's an issue for Kansans. If Brownback wants to exert political pressure to get outcomes, I think that's probably okay too, but I don't think that pressure can come in the form of defunding a coequal branch of the government.
The issue for me is really how the separation of powers battle is resolved. It will be fascinating to see where this goes and how the Court responds -- likely with a lawsuit that disputes the cons utionality of tying funding to the outcomes of cases and likely under the Guarantee Clause of Article IV of the US Cons ution, which raises its own sets of federalism concerns.
"the judiciary loses its independence"
elected judges aren't independent, they're corrupt until proven otherwise.
Can stinky Brownbutt and his Repug accomplices extorting judicial rulings be resolved in state, or can it be appealed to Federal jurisdiction?
I'm not sure that Kansas has purely partisan elections for its judges, but I'm not talking about independence in the sense that you are here. Regardless of its ideological bent, a court has to be able to function free of any interference from the other branches, and must (in that sense) be free from extortion by budgeting, particularly where funding is predicated entirely on outcomes. In any event, the Kansas Supreme Court has been willing to strike down some of Brownback's efforts, so the partisanship that you're concerned about is actually somewhat balanced (for now) in Kansas.
As for resolving the cons utional issue that this all seems to present, I don't see how the judiciary of a state could rule on the cons utionality of a rule that affects that judiciary; there is a clear conflict of interest there, which should necessitate resort to the federal judiciary for a resolution. And it won't be appealed to the federal judiciary -- it will almost certainly begin there and work its way through the federal courts (though it's possible (I haven't checked) that this sort of question could invoke the original jurisdiction of the Supreme Court).
tlongII once again proven to be a hack while everyone who told him he was wrong is proven right. Again
these gots never learn
http://www.forbes.com/sites/rexsinqu...-real-numbers/
Kansas Economic Growth Is On The Rebound--Look At The Real Numbers
When Kansas Governor Sam Brownback enacted his bold approach to tax reform, he gave a much-needed boost to small businesses throughout the state. Thanks to Brownback’s tax cuts, these businesses can make greater investments, hire more employees, and set themselves on a more stable course toward the future. Considering that 44 percent of working Kansans are employed by small businesses, the Brownback tax cuts positively impact thousands of families.
Unfortunately, no good deed goes unpunished, with outlets like the Kansas City Star questioning the wisdom and efficacy of the cuts. The Star’s editorial board published a column downplaying the positive impact the cuts have had on the state’s small businesses and expressing skepticism about Kansas’ ability to draw in business from states with higher tax burdens. In an excellent rebuttal to the Star’s editorial, the Kansas Policy Ins ute outlines the problematic nature of their claims. While successful growth is typically measured in the number of private-sector jobs created, the Star instead uses (but does not disclose this fact) nonfarm jobs – in other words, the total of government and private sector jobs.
Additionally, as the KPI paper rightly points out, the Star uses point-to-point comparisons to make its case, comparing Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers from January 2014 and January 2015. A more reasoned and accurate approach is to look at average annual employment numbers (which the BLS also publishes), in order to mitigate the impact of any single large e or decline. Looking at these bigger-picture numbers, we see that Kansas nonfarm jobs grew by 2.4 percent between December 2012 and January 2015. In Missouri during the same timeframe, nonfarm jobs increased by 1.9 percent. This more stable, accurate comparison of average annual employment reveals Kansas to be growing faster than Missouri – whether you use nonfarm or private-sector employment figures.
Also, since Brownback’s tax reform, private-sector GDP has increased in Kansas. The Tax Foundation shows Kansas outperforming the 50-state average in 2013 (the numbers for 2014 aren’t yet available), as well as far outperforming the ten states with the highest state and local tax burden. In the fourteen years prior to tax reform, Kansas lagged behind.
Kansans should be celebrating their state’s strides. The growth of small businesses in Kansas is at an annual rate of 6 percent – higher than the national average and higher than the growth in any neighboring states, including Missouri. In the 2013 tax year, more than 8,600 first-time small-business filers invigorated the state’s economy with more than $486 million in new income.
As Governor Brownback himself stated this week: “Our goal, as a state, should be growing an economy that provides opportunity and jobs for all Kansans. A tax policy that puts more money in the hands of working Kansans and that rewards productivity is resulting in growth in Kansas, without question.”
Leaders in other states should be inspired by the small business and employment gains in Kansas as they examine their own state tax policies and determine which reform options will work best in their own home states.
Oh gee, a tlongII article from 6 weeks ago. Meanwhile in the real world, they're raising taxes on the poor to pay for the income taxes for the wealthy.
Kansas’ regressive approach to redistributing wealth
06/16/15 09:27 AM—UPDATED 06/16/15 09:28 AM
By Steve Benen
There are two main problems with Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback’s (R) far-right economic experiment. The first is that the plan didn’t work – it didn’t create the promised jobs boom; it didn’t create massive growth; and it didn’t cause businesses to stampede into the state.
The second problem is the challenge of dealing with the consequences of failure. The Republican governor’s plan, after causing a debt downgrade, left a significant hole in Kansas’ state budget, which GOP policymakers have struggled badly to fill.
A few days ago, however, the Republican-run state government grudgingly approved a new budget, which actually included tax increases. Reluctant lawmakers said Brownback hadn’t left them much of a choice – Brownback effectively told the state legislature to raise sales taxes and cigarette taxes or he’d slash funding even more on education and disability services.
From a distance, it might seem as if this were a liberal solution to a conservative problem – Kansas Republicans got themselves in a jam by cutting taxes too much, and to put things right, they decided to start raising taxes to fix the problem. But the details matter and that’s not quite right.
The Kansas City Star’s Dave ing explained it’s not just a matter of asking Kansans to pay more – it’s a question of which Kansans will pay more.[N]o group, experts believe, gets hurt more than the state’s low- and moderate-income workers, those earning between $30,000 and $50,000 a year. They now face higher taxes on essential purchases without most of the subsidies that protect poorer Kansans from government’s bite.Let’s call this what it is: a redistribution of wealth, from the bottom up. Kansas is keeping its tax breaks for the wealthy, while approving tax increases – by some measures, “the largest tax increase in state history” – that will disproportionately affect those at the bottom.
Low-income workers, unlike those with significantly higher earnings, must watch their pennies carefully to pay for other essentials such as transportation and housing. Soon, more of those pennies – which quickly grow to dollars – will be on their way to Topeka.
This may seem counter-intuitive. After all, everyone will pay the same sales taxes, regardless of income, so conservatives may see this as equitable and fair.
But it’s not. As a Washington Post piece recently explained, “People who make less are more vulnerable to increases in sales and excise taxes, since they spend more of their money buying basic goods and services they need to get by. This is especially the case in Kansas, where food is subject to sales tax. Kansans can receive a tax rebate for their food purchases, but those who make nothing or too little to owe income tax aren’t eligible. They pay the sales tax on food in full.”
And now, Kansas has one of the highest, most regressive food taxes in the nation.
Congratulations, Kansas. You appear to be living in a ensian nightmare.
The tax cuts worked so well, they had to raise taxes.
the comments section on that article
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/...tm_source=SFFB
According to various reports from the state capital, several lawmakers cast their votes in tears, one Republican accused the governor’s administration of blackmail, and exactly no one thought the plan actually solved the state’s longterm budget woes. “Next year will be my 40th year in the Legislature, and I have never seen a session like this one,” Anthony Hensley, who leads the Senate’s small contingent of Democrats, told me by phone on Friday. “It was completely chaotic and dysfunctional.”
All that new revenue, along with about $50 million in spending cuts, was needed to close a deep deficit that had embarrassed its conservative governor and thrown its legislature into a months-long gridlock that resembled, well, Congress. As we wrote in April, the deficit resulted in large part from Brownback’s own “real live experiment” in supply-side economics—sharp cuts in income tax rates and a huge exemption for owners of small businesses.
Ask any fiscal expert, and Kansas’s budget crisis demanded a reckoning—either with its tax code or its longterm spending structure. But its government wasn’t up to it. Aligned with conservatives in the Senate, Brownback steadfastly refused to consider a direct reversal of the original tax plan, insisting that the state continue on its path toward replacing the income tax entirely with consumption taxes. The most he would do was freeze the rates, and the result was a plan that will place an even heavier tax burden on the poor, according to the Ins ute on Taxation and Economic Policy. Hensley said that when state and local sales taxes are combined, Kansas will have the highest tax on food in the nation in some areas of the state. Brownback, who had hired the economist Arthur Laffer to help craft his original tax plan, had been touting the state’s economic recovery to argue that his fiscal vision was starting to work. But a report released Friday found that Kansas had lost nearly 4,000 jobs in May, trailing both the national trend and neighboring Missouri, which added 6,600 jobs.
yawn, Repugs creating an ideological dystopia, and DENYING the facts that they ed up.
trickle down: enrich the 1%, screw the 99%, never has worked, doesn't work, never will work.
resulting deficits to be filled with highly regressive taxes.
Consumption tax is very probably only RETAIL sales tax, not VAT added at each stage between source and retail, giving a break to businesses.
crofl, the same Art Laffer that's having his "independent" minions write OPed's on WSJ touting how the plan "works"...
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