Republicans Are Trying Out a Shiny New Excuse For the Great Kansas Failure

Last week a reader emailed me about a new meme he had just come across:

Heard a random Republican talking head on NPR recently, and when the interviewer questioned him on the “Kansas experiment,” his automatic response was a) Kansas “massively” increased spending when they cut taxes, so that’s why they have problems; and b) North Carolina has done the same thing without the increased spending and it’s working great.

Of course this smells like bullshit to me, but I don’t actually know. Are either of these assertions correct?

I’m too lazy to waste time on North Carolina right now, but spending in Kansas is easy enough to check. Here it is:

Since 2011, when Sam Brownback took office promising a “red state experiment,” general fund spending has been flat while spending from all sources has declined by 1.7 percent. I’m pretty sure this doesn’t count as “massively” increasing spending.

Bottom line: Brownback slashed taxes, kept spending flat, wrecked Kansas schools, and turned in lousy economic performance compared to his neighboring states:

By just about any measure, the red-state experiment failed, and Republicans can hardly run away from Kansas fast enough. I guess their latest wheeze is to pretend that Brownback was a faker all along and it was really North Carolina we should have kept an eye on. Uh huh.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

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