How Kansas Is Selling Sam Brownback’s Failed Trickle-Down Tax Cuts

Charlie Riedel/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback’s reelection campaign is in serious trouble. The latest poll has the incumbent Republican losing to his Democratic opponent by 4 percentage points.

As I explained in our November/December issue, Brownback’s woes can largely be traced back to the drastic tax cuts for the wealthy that he pushed through the state legislature. Kansas’ tax rate for top earners dropped from 6.45 to 4.9 percent, with further future cuts baked in. The cuts were even more generous for business owners, entirely wiping away their tax burden for pass-through income.

Brownback sold his tax cuts on supply-side promises of unbounded future growth, but the results have been less than stellar: While the state’s unemployment rate, like the national jobless rate, has dropped over the past few years, Kansas’ economic growth has lagged behind its neighbors’.

Despite these disappointing results, the state has settled on enticing out-of-state businesses with its low tax rate. Check out this full-page ad from the Kansas Department of Commerce, scanned from an issue of the US Small Business Administration’s magazine Small Business Resource by a reader:

That ad’s pitch—”one of the most pro-growth tax policies in the country” leads to “a perfect state”—lines up with the theories of free-market economist Arthur Laffer, the grand poobah of Ronald Reagan’s trickle-down economics. Brownback cited Laffer’s work to justify his cuts. During the thick of the legislative debate, he flew Laffer in for a three-day sales pitch, costing the state $75,000.

When I called Laffer in August, he excitedly proclaimed that Brownback’s cuts would prove a resounding success. “I’ll make you a very large bet that Kansas will improve its relative position to the US over, let’s say, eight years, hands down. I’ll bet you with great odds,” he told me. “I feel very confident that what Sam Brownback has done is and will be extraordinarily beneficial for the state of Kansas.”

As Laffer saw it, low tax rates would entice out-of-state residents and businesses to relocate. Laffer himself had moved to Tennessee sight unseen nine years ago, fleeing from California because of the Volunteer State’s lack of income tax. “In someplace like Kansas, I don’t think the income tax makes any sense whatsoever,” Laffer said. “That’s what we’re trying to move toward in Kansas. The income tax is a killer.”

Except that magical migration hasn’t developed yet. In August, the state added just 900 jobs, with a tepid growth rate of just half a percent for the full year. Maybe I should have made that bet with Laffer.

Fact:

Mother Jones was founded as a nonprofit in 1976 because we knew corporations and billionaires wouldn't fund the type of hard-hitting journalism we set out to do.

Today, reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget, allows us to dig deep on stories that matter, and lets us keep our reporting free for everyone. If you value what you get from Mother Jones, please join us with a tax-deductible donation today so we can keep on doing the type of journalism 2022 demands.

payment methods

Fact:

Today, reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget, allows us to dig deep on stories that matter, and lets us keep our reporting free for everyone. If you value what you get from Mother Jones, please join us with a tax-deductible donation today so we can keep on doing the type of journalism 2022 demands.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate