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Progressives like to talk about Kansas
Topic Started: Aug 11 2016, 07:50 PM (321 Views)
Berton
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colo_crawdad
Aug 12 2016, 10:20 PM
Berton
Aug 12 2016, 10:07 PM
colo_crawdad
Aug 12 2016, 09:56 PM
Berton
Aug 12 2016, 12:01 PM
aaasbump
BEWARE THE TROLL!


I see that you want to continue the battle. Okay that is fine with me. I can give out as much or more than you can comrade.

I am not interested in any “battle.” I do not post, as Berton and Neutral do, material that is intended only to insult or anger or irritate others into a response.

TROLL ALERT!!!!
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Berton
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Stoned
Aug 12 2016, 10:30 PM
colo_crawdad
Aug 11 2016, 08:54 PM
While it it unusual for a member to start a thread with the explicit purpose of deflecting discussion about another topic, This one apparently does just that.
Let's talk about Kansas. The greatest repudiation of GOP economic theory ever!

No, lets talk about Illinois where the progressive government has bankrupted the state.

That is after all what this thread is all about. Unless of course you are ashamed of what progressives did to Illinois then I can understand why you want to divert.

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Stoned
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C'mon,lets talk about Kansas, where GO economics were proven to be a scam. Much like most GOP proposals.
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Stoned
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Why won't anyone talk about Kansas? Economic garbage pit.
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Brewster
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I'll talk about Kansas - a GOP disaster.

Quote:
 
The Great Kansas Tea Party Disaster
Extremist Republicans turned their government into a lab experiment of tax cuts and privatization. And now they may be losing control of one of the reddest states in the nation

The Republican party headquarters in Wichita, Kansas, shares space in a strip mall with Best Friends Pet Clinic, a cowboy-boot repair shop and a Chinese restaurant called the Magic Wok. Inside, on a recent Wednesday afternoon, a modest gathering of party faithful mill about, I'M A BROWNBACKER stickers affixed to their blouses and lapels.

It's a terrible slogan. Four years ago, when Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback first took office, you might've wondered if these people, on some subliminal level, actually wanted to be humiliated by a filthy-minded liberal activist looking to add a new "santorum" to Urban Dictionary. As a senator and a failed presidential candidate, Brownback was already one of the nation's most prominent social conservatives, "God's Senator," in the words of a 2006 Rolling Stone profile. But Brownback turned out to be even more radical when it came to economic policy. In 2012, he enacted the largest package of tax cuts in Kansas history, essentially transforming his state into a lab experiment for extreme free-market ideology. The results (disastrous) have reduced the governor to making appearances at grim strip malls like this one in a desperate attempt to salvage his re-election bid.

Lima, Ohio, has been struggling for decades – and the GOP’s radical policies are making it even worse.

The last time I came to Kansas, in March 2013, Brownback could often be found wandering the halls of the state Capitol, sporting one of his signature sweater vests, smiling and nodding at passing strangers or offering impromptu lectures to schoolchildren paused in front of the oil painting of John Brown, the fearsome Kansas abolitionist, that hangs outside his office. Here in Wichita, though, he looks exhausted. When he takes the stage, he squints out at the audience through puffy eyes. His Texas counterpart, Gov. Rick Perry, stands behind him, having been summoned north to help bail out Brownback's flailing campaign.

Brownback gently teases Perry about how "now we have a small-business climate in Kansas that is better than Texas." Perry flips up his palms and silently makes his oops! face.

Then the Texan steps to the podium and delivers a version of a speech I saw him give earlier this year in Kentucky, where he had been mobilized on a similar mission for Mitch McConnell. After boasting about all the jobs his policies have drawn to his state, Perry praises Brownback for placing Kansas on a similar "upward trajectory," insisting to the Wichita Republicans that for the past three years, his own team of poachers no longer even bothers trying to lure companies from Kansas – Brownback's radical economic reforms had simply made Kansas too attractive to business. "You go fish," Perry drawls, "where the fish are."

There are a couple of problems with Perry's speech. First of all, he happens to be delivering it in Wichita, where, this summer, Boeing, for decades the largest private employer in the state of Kansas, shuttered its entire operation, shifting those jobs to cities like Seattle, Oklahoma City and San Antonio, Texas (oops).

The larger problem, of course, is that Perry wouldn't even have to be here in Kansas if Brownback's economic plan had not already proved catastrophic.

Back in 2011, Arthur Laffer, the Reagan-era godfather of supply-side economics, brought to Wichita by Brownback as a paid consultant, sounded like an exiled Marxist theoretician who'd lived to see a junta leader finally turn his words into deeds. "Brownback and his whole group there, it's an amazing thing they're doing," Laffer gushed to The Washington Post that December. "It's a revolution in a cornfield." Veteran Kansas political reporter John Gramlich, a more impartial observer, described Brownback as being in pursuit of "what may be the boldest agenda of any governor in the nation," not only cutting taxes but also slashing spending on education, social services and the arts, and, later, privatizing the entire state Medicaid system.

Brownback himself went around the country telling anyone who'd listen that Kansas could be seen as a sort of test case, in which unfettered libertarian economic policy could be held up and compared right alongside the socialistic overreach of the Obama administration, and may the best theory of government win. "We'll see how it works," he bragged on Morning Joe in 2012. "We'll have a real live experiment."

That word, "experiment," has come to haunt Brownback as the data rolls in. The governor promised his "pro-growth tax policy" would act "like a shot of adrenaline in the heart of the Kansas economy," but, instead, state revenues plummeted by nearly $700 million in a single fiscal year, both Moody's and Standard & Poor's downgraded the state's credit rating, and job growth sagged behind all four of Kansas' neighbors. Brownback wound up nixing a planned sales-tax cut to make up for some of the shortfall, but not before he'd enacted what his opponents call the largest cuts in education spending in the history of Kansas.

Brownback hardly stands alone among the class of Republican governors who managed to get themselves elected four years ago as part of the anti-Obama Tea Party wave by peddling musty supply-side fallacies. In Ohio, Gov. John Kasich – whose press releases claim he's wrought an "Ohio Miracle" – has presided over a shrinking economy, this past July being the 21st consecutive month in which the state's job growth has lagged behind the national average. In Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker, whose union-busting inadvertently helped kick off the Occupy movement, cut taxes by roughly $2 billion – yet his promise to create 250,000 new private-sector jobs during his first term has fallen about 150,000 jobs short, and forecasters expect the state to face a $1.8 billion budgetary shortfall by mid-2017.

A recent analysis by the Detroit Free Press, meanwhile, laid out how the tax policies of Gov. Rick Snyder, a wealthy entrepreneur who campaigned in Michigan as a nerdy technocrat, have resulted in businesses paying less ($1.7 billion less per year, to be exact), individuals paying more ($900 million per year) and – here's the kicker – job growth slowing every year since Snyder's cuts have been enacted.

Snyder and Walker remain in dead heats with their Democratic opponents, with Kasich holding a comfortable lead over his own. Of all these geniuses, though, Brownback exists in a class of his own, thanks both to the vainglorious scale of his project and the inescapable reality of its flop. And what must have longtime Brownback patrons like the Koch brothers most freaked out is how starkly his failure highlights the shortcomings of their own ideology.

Brownback's policies have been so unpopular, in fact, that a group of more than 100 moderate Republicans, nearly all of them former or current state officeholders, have publicly backed his Democratic opponent, state Rep. Paul Davis, who, until the race's recent tightening, had been leading consistently in polls. Calling themselves Republicans for Kansas Values, the moderates released a manifesto of sorts, which reads in part, "We are Republicans in the historical and traditional sense of the word. Yet in today's political climate in Kansas, traditional Republican values have been corrupted by extremists, claiming to be agents of change. It is a faction which hides behind the respected Republican brand in an effort to defund and dismantle our state's infrastructure. . . . The policies [they] espouse are radical departures. . . . They jeopardize the economy and endanger our children's future with reckless abandon. . . . We reject their extremist agenda."
Link

And, in spite of the abject failure of the "Experiment",
I'm willing to predict that not a single "Righty" on this board
and not a single Federal Republican of note
will ever admit that their Economic Model is now, and always was,
total nonsense.
Edited by Brewster, Aug 13 2016, 12:01 AM.
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colo_crawdad
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It appears that neither exdtrelme position of the Tea aParty in Kansas or the liberals in Illinois makes for a dessirable situation. The lesson is probably that it is best to reject extremism.
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Berton
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WOW a new record by the childish racist progressives. Nine post and not one about the subject matter. But they go cry to Pat if their threads are not discussed. What a bunch of cry babies.

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Brewster
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That is up for the prize as the dumbest post yet. But it is strong on ridiculous insults.

But Bertie has many entries already.

Colo, you are quite correct. Extremism in any form has always failed.
Edited by Brewster, Aug 13 2016, 02:09 AM.
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Berton
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Brewster
Aug 13 2016, 02:07 AM
That is up for a prize as the dumbest post yet.

But Bertie has many entries already.

Colo, you are quite correct. Extremism in any form has always failed.

As we can see the child racist called Brewster is still calling people names and avoiding the subject. It is obvious that these children do not want any discussion to be allowed about any subject they do not agree with.

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Stoned
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Berton
Aug 13 2016, 02:10 AM
Brewster
Aug 13 2016, 02:07 AM
That is up for a prize as the dumbest post yet.

But Bertie has many entries already.

Colo, you are quite correct. Extremism in any form has always failed.

As we can see the child racist called Brewster is still calling people names and avoiding the subject. It is obvious that these children do not want any discussion to be allowed about any subject they do not agree with.

When is Trump going to release his tax returns.
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