In Kansas, Brownback now has lower approval rating than Obama

[KingOrfeo]

No, seriously.

This weekend brought the hilarious news that the approval rating for Sam Brownback, governor of Kansas and multi-year winner of the award for “Midwestern Republican Politician Who Most Resembles an Undertaker,” has fallen to an amazing low of 18 percent, while 48 percent pronounced themselves “very dissatisfied” with him. Most humiliating of all for Brownback? In this heavily Republican state, Barack Obama is outpolling him by double digits, with 28 percent of Kansas residents pronouncing themselves “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with the president’s job performance.

One cannot overstate just how badly Brownback and his pet Republican far-right legislature have wrecked Kansas in just a few years. The governor came into office in early 2011 promising to turn the state into a “real live experiment” for trickle-down economics that involved cutting tax rates to goose economic growth, which would fill the state’s coffers with so much revenue that Kansans would be literally swimming through seas of cash to get to Jayhawks basketball games. In other words, the usual supply-side plans that conservatives cling to no matter how many times they have crashed and burned at the national level.

To the surprise of absolutely no one who lived through the 1980s under Reagan or the 2000s under George W. Bush, Brownback’s economic plans have not worked out. This year the state found itself with a budget deficit of somewhere around $600 million. It has an annual job-growth rate almost four percentage points below the nationwide average. In June, after an exceptionally long legislative, Brownback signed a bitterly fought-over budget that requires the state to slash education funding and raid its highway fund in order to bring it into balance. Enjoy your potholes, Kansas!

Even getting to a balanced budget required the raising of taxes somewhere. Brownback refused to even partly repeal his income tax cuts that contributed to the whole budget mess in the first place. He did agree to an increase in the state sales tax, along with consumption taxes on items like cigarettes. These are regressive tax increases because they hit the state’s poor and working class residents the hardest. So Kansas is trying to dig out of the mess it made for itself on the backs of its poorest and most vulnerable residents. While also denying many of them health care, since Brownback refused Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, which the federal government would have paid for.

If I were Sam Brownback, I’d issue an executive order for law enforcement to confiscate all the pitchforks in the state.

And there must be a lot of pitchforks in Kansas.

 

[Nathan_Brazil]

But will they learn?

The next election will roll around, and they'll behave like good lemmings and re-elect the tea party idiots.

 

[someoneyouknow]

On my recent trip out West, I spent as little money in Kansas as I could. I had to stay over night and eat dinner there, but other than gas and $3 on the turnpike, that's all I spent money on in the state.

I didn't want to help this guy and his quixotic attempt at trickle-down economics which have never worked.