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This is what happens when you try to drown government in a bathtub

KingOrfeo said:
One advantage of a federal system is that the states can serve as "little laboratories" to try out new things and see the results, before the whole country commits to them. E.g., women's suffrage seemed like a very radical notion in the early 20th Century -- it upended centuries of cultural assumptions about proper gender roles, public sphere for men, domestic sphere for women -- but a few states out west tried it, and society there did not collapse, and it didn't seem like such a radical notion any more. Colorado recently legalized marijuana; if in 10 years drug-related problems in Colorado do not appear to have grown any worse, perhaps other states will follow suit.

Meanwhile, in Kansas, we now have proof of the results of hard-RW economic policies, at least when applied at the state level. It is not a pretty picture.

Sunday, Sep 21, 2014 07:00 AM EDT

In Brownbackistan, everything is awesome! And don’t let any liberal tell you different

Sam Brownback's wrecking crew built "model red state" with huge tax cuts. They gutted Kansas and people now know it

Thomas Frank

If you visit the campaign web site of Kansas Governor Sam Brownback, who is fighting a difficult battle for re-election, you will see a series of large-type boasts about his nonexistent economic achievements, and then you will read this:



Yes: Join I today. The governor of Kansas wrote this—or signed it, anyway—and just above a list item declaring “Investing in Education.”

It is a small matter, and yet it is typical in its own careless way of the man’s calamitous administration of my home state since he ascended to the governorship in 2010. Everything was supposed to be so awesome in Kansas, so godly and upright, and everything has gone so very wrong. The little things, the big things, and everything in between.

You might recall that Sam Brownback was, in his days in Congress and the Senate, one of the most prominent national leaders of the Republican Party’s moral-purity wing; he even briefly ran for president in 2007. Matters of the spirit were quite the thing in conservative rhetoric in those days, and Brownback was always in that movement’s fore, crusading against offensive entertainment, stem cell research, and other abominations. Put a man like Brownback in charge of an executive branch, however, and a different figure emerges. He wanted to build a “red-state model” in Kansas, he used to say, a community of righteousness that could “show the way back to being America again.” What he has constructed instead is a microcosm of everything that is wrong and disastrous with conservative governance.

It is as though Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay had been transplanted to Topeka and given a free hand to sculpt the state however they chose. You’ve got runaway incompetence in the state administration; heavy-handed partisanship, with conservative Republicans crushing moderate Republicans after the familiar pattern; corporate money—Koch Industries is based in Wichita—sloshing around like a vast underground aquifer. You’ve got privatization, deregulation, and an enthusiastic race to the bottom. (Gotta be more business-friendly than those people in Missouri!)

You’ve got tax cuts so severe they’ve brought on fiscal catastrophe and thrown the state’s school system into crisis. You’ve got bullying by state legislators against organizations that criticize Brownback’s healthcare plans, and hints of pay-to-play corruption just under the surface. And, of course you’ve got credit downgrades as all this becomes known to the outside world.

The wrecking crew is in full swing in Kansas, and for once the people there seem to be ticked off about it. Once the hero of the state’s sin-hating millions, Sam Brownback is unpopular today. Indeed, his situation is so bad that the only sure way he can be rescued is by a mass disregard for economic reality—by cognitive blinders strapped on simultaneously by millions of individuals.

Either that, or by the culture wars.

Very soon, I expect, the time will come for Brownback to rally Kansans around the fetus. For now, however, it is the mass-cognitive-blinder strategy that leaps out at you when you cast your eyes over his reign. In a 2013 speech about his red-state model, for example, he talked about the “principles” that undergirded his plan, and insisted they were not of the kind detectable by ratiocination: “it can’t be mental principles, it’s got to be things that connect through the heart.”

And Brownback meant it. During the 2012 debate over whether to swallow his strychnine tax cuts, Brownback’s team brought to Topeka none other than economist Arthur Laffer, he of the repeatedly discredited theory that cutting taxes magically increases government revenues. Laffer’s formula has been tried again and again at the national level and has famously failed, but the Kansas legislature jumped when presented with its very own chance to defy “mental principles.” Unfortunately, the rules of accounting prevailed and now Sam Brownback’s reelection campaign is begging voters to persuade themselves that everything they’ve read in the newspaper is a falsehood; that things are really and truly OK, despite the evidence of the senses: “The sun is shining in Kansas and don’t let anybody tell you any different.”

That last is the tagline Brownback delivers in one of his TV commercials that you can watch yourself on YouTube. It is something to behold. I have never been in a cult indoctrination session, but I have started to think that this ad depicts the procedure. Here is this weirdly smirking man, Governor Brownback, telling you something he obviously doesn’t believe—and then he’s telling a different group—and then another. Each of these audiences is nodding constantly; each of them is made up of clean, neatly dressed people—some of them in a well-appointed suburban kitchen, some of them sitting on a pleasant veranda, some of them in a corporate boardroom. And the subject the governor is advising them on is how you get out of poverty! You know: hard work, family structure. “That’s the way out of poverty!,” he exults, with that odd smile of his. To judge by the clothes and the settings, however, these people have never even had cause to doubt the timely arrival of their next meal, let alone fear a lifetime of ill-paid toil. For practical purposes, Brownback might as well be giving them tips on how to land a spaceship on the surface of the moon.

It makes no sense. But the unspoken object of the session is obvious: Don’t worry about what is happening. All these reports about economic disaster in Kansas—about the “poverty” that conservatism is supposedly inflicting on people—forget about them. It has nothing to do with the way you govern a state.

*

There has also been a shock-and-awe quality about the Brownback years. So numerous are the consequences of Kansas’s tax cuts (to choose the central item from Sam Brownback’s list of reforms), that it is difficult to try to process them all. By this I do not merely mean to point out that the tax cuts turned out to be much better for the rich than for everyone else; that’s kind of a cliché at this point—or that the tax cuts haven’t brought the economic growth Brownback said they would; that, too, is always the way these things turn out. More important is the panorama of disaster they have inflicted on education in the state: Fewer teachers working with more students, cuts to sports and art programs, and even school closings here and there.

Local governments, meanwhile have tried to make up the shortfall by raising property taxes (which are paid by a big part of the population in rural states), with the ironic result that while the hated moderate yuppies in the posh Kansas City suburbs get to enjoy Brownback’s tax cuts, the hardworking conservatives of the poorer counties have to pay much more. Other institutions have felt the pain as well: There was a risk, at one point, that the state’s courts would run out of money, and now Kansas prisons, that favorite conservative institution, are reportedly being forced to operate with insufficient guards. But what’s the big deal? A leader of the conservatives in the state legislature admitted in July that chopping back government was, in fact, one of the goals of the tax cuts all along.

Of the dozens of accounts of catastrophe-in-Brownbackistan that I have sifted through, however, the one I keep coming back to is the tale of Aaron Jack, a Tea Party Republican whom Governor Brownback appointed to run the Kansas Securities Commission back in 2011. A Tea Party financial regulator—oh, wouldn’t Rick Santelli be proud!

Can you guess how the Tea Partier played it? Yes, you can: He played it exactly like the hack-n-crony regulators of the Bush Administration that the Tea Party was supposed to be so very different from. Jack’s main agenda item, according to a withering account of his tenure that ran last year in the Topeka Capital Journal, was to get rid of a majority of the commission’s staff and replace them with political allies and, of course, lobbyists. His grand vision was to cut the regulated some slack, to remake the state as a place where hedge-fund types would no longer need to worry too much about “overzealous” supervisors — “to open Kansas as a destination state for hedge fund managers, private equity operators and venture capitalists.” With the tools of deregulation they were going to build a Wall Street on the Plains—and along the way Mr. Jack somehow found money in the commission’s budget to air radio spots in which he himself told listeners about all the neat things he was doing. Finally, when things didn’t work out for him in politics, it was through the revolving door to a local brokerage. Or, as the Topeka paper put it, in a near-perfect Midwestern voice:



That story has pretty much been lost amid the broader avalanche of calamity in Kansas, but still it’s worth dwelling upon. Ten years ago, when I wrote a book about politics in the place where I grew up, I was impressed by the populist tone of the state’s conservative rebels. I was amused by the way they mocked the state’s successful and well-connected professional class. (This kind of thing still goes on, of course. On Thursday, Republican Senator Pat Roberts, who also finds himself behind in the polls,denounced his opponent as “another millionaire politician trying to deceive voters and buy a U.S. Senate seat.”) In the aftermath of the slump brought to you in 2008 by Wall Street, those populist rebels won. Thanks to the Great Recession, those rebels were able to defeat their opponents completely. The offices of the state are now nearly entirely at their command.

And what have the populists’ leaders done with that power? To say they proceeded to sit down and write passionate love letters to Wall Street is hyperbole, but it’s not sufficient. What is going on here is so freakishly self-damaging, so bizarrely self-contradicting that it makes you think of a man trying out his new shotgun on his own foot, or of a president putting a meth addict in charge of the nuclear football.

Think back over all those years of prayer and organizing and going door to door and yelling about the liberal elite with their lattes and their fancy Volvos—what has it fetched the rebellious right-wingers of my home state? Yes, one of their leaders got a cash-out job in leafy Leawood. Hopefully a McMansion, too. But for most of the rest of them it’s crumbling schools and dwindling services and the huge expressionless face of the local ag monopoly, remorselessly bidding down the labor of their neighbors. Before they vote again for that prayerful fellow who makes such a show of genuflecting before Mammon the great and powerful, they need to consider: maybe this guy’s got the wrong god.

Thomas Frank is a Salon politics and culture columnist. His many books include "What's The Matter With Kansas," "Pity the Billionaire" and "One Market Under God." He is the founding editor of The Baffler magazine.
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Illinois is proof positive of liberal policies.
 
Boxlicker101 said:
Would you care to explain what you mean by that? I have certainly never sold out anybody, especially not a city. :confused:[/QUOTE

Was your computer made in America? If not shut the fuck up.

Yes, I have sold out my nation, it wasn't entirely my fault since my choices were highly limited but that doesn't eliminate my guilt.

Personal responsibility. A liberal concept.
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Sean Renaud said:
Boxlicker101 said:
Would you care to explain what you mean by that? I have certainly never sold out anybody, especially not a city. :confused:[/QUOTE

Was your computer made in America? If not shut the fuck up.

Yes, I have sold out my nation, it wasn't entirely my fault since my choices were highly limited but that doesn't eliminate my guilt.

Personal responsibility. A liberal concept.
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It's a Hewlett Packard and, yes, it was. http://www.tomshardware.com/news/HP-Apple-PC-Mac-U.S.,19673.html

I drive a Corolla, which was made by a Japanese company but assembled in Fremont, CA.

And personal responsibility is more a Cons. concept than a Lib. one. Libs are looking to provide cradle to grave welfare for anybody who claims to need it.
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When people say they want government to be so small they can drown it in a bathtub, I think of them as people who like to drown small things in bathtubs.
 
KingOrfeo said:
Brownback's new strategy: Attack Paul Davis because he got a lap dance once in the '90s.
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I see nothing wrong with using this fact in a mudslinging campaign. Basically, he was patronizing a prostitute. Personally, I would not hold this against anybody, especially since the man was unmarried at the time, but enough people will consider it to be an act of immorality that it's worth bringing up.
 
Could be worse. Could be Tennessee.

Thursday, Apr 11, 2013 08:14 AM EDT

Tennessee: Ayn Rand’s vision of paradise

The southern state ranks dead last in per capita tax revenue, and its low-income families are paying the price

Les Leopold, AlterNet

If you’re worried about where America is heading, look no further than Tennessee. Its lush mountains and verdant rolling countryside belie a mean-spirited public policy that only makes sense if you believe deeply in the anti-collectivist, anti-altruist philosophy of Ayn Rand. It’s what you get when you combine hatred for government with disgust for poor people.

Tennessee starves what little government it has, ranking dead last in per capita tax revenue. To fund its minimalist public sector, it makes sure that low-income residents pay as much as possible through heavily regressive sales taxes, which rank 10th highest among all states as a percent of total tax revenues. (For more detailed data see here.)

As you would expect, this translates into hard times for its public school systems, which rank 48th in school revenues per student and 45th in teacher salaries. The failure to invest in education also corresponds with poverty: the state has the 40th worst poverty rate (15%) and the 13th highest state percentage of poor children (26%).

Employment opportunities also are extremely poor for the poor. Only 25% have full-time jobs, 45% are employed part-time, and a whopping 30% have no jobs at all.

So what do you do with all those low-income folks who don’t have decent jobs? You put a good number of them in jail. In fact, only Louisiana, Georgia and New Mexico have higher jail incarceration rates.

From the perspective of Tennessee legislators, it’s all about providing the proper incentives to motivate the poor. For starters, you make sure that no one could possible live on welfare payments (TANF: Temporary Assistance to Needy Families). Although President Clinton’s welfare reform program curtailed how long a family can receive welfare (60 months) and dramatically increased the work requirements, Tennessee set the maximum family welfare payment at only $185 per month. (That’s how much a top hedge fund manager makes in under one second.) As a result, the Volunteer State ranks 49th in TANF, just above Mississippi ($170).

Kick ‘em when they’re down or tough love?

In the Randian universe, it’s not enough to starve public education and the poor. You also must blame the poor both for their poverty and for the crumbling educational system. If a poor child is failing it must be the fault of low-income parents. So how do you drive the point home? You take away their welfare checks if their kids don’t do well in school, which is precisely what the Tennessee House and Senate are about to do. The KnoxvilleNews.com reports:

The bill is sponsored by Sen. Stacey Campfield, R-Knoxville, and Rep. Vance Dennis, R-Savannah. It calls for a 30 percent reduction in Temporary Assistance for Needy Families benefits to parents whose children are not making satisfactory progress in school.
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More amazing still, the bill originally applied to all children of TANF parents, even if they were severely disabled. Realizing that they had gone too far, the bill was amended so that, “it would not apply when a child has a handicap or learning disability or when the parent takes steps to try improving the youngster’s school performance — such as signing up for a parenting class, arranging a tutoring program or attending a parent-teacher conference.” (Imagine the uproar if those provision were applied to upper-income parents, assuming any still use the public school system.)

Dennis told the House Health Subcommittee the measure now only applies to “parents who do nothing.” He described the measure as “a carrot and stick approach.”

Obviously, this is insane, right? Not if you’ve already started down the road of whipping the poor into shape. The proposed draconian cuts are just an extension of previous policies that already made welfare contingent on school attendance. As Travis Waldron reports in ThinkProgress:

When Campfield introduced the legislation in January, he said parents have “gotten away with doing absolutely nothing to help their children” in school. “That’s child abuse to me,” he added. Tennessee already ties welfare to education by mandating a 20 percent cut in benefits if students do not meet attendance standards, but this change would place the burden of maintaining benefits squarely on children, who would face costing their family much-needed assistance if they don’t keep up in school.
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By the way, the Tennessee legislature is lily-white: One percent is Latino, 6% AfricanAmerican and 91% Caucasian. But the complexion of poverty is darker. Nearly 80 percent of Tennessee’s poor children are black and brown.

Attacking the poor as the answer to the Wall Street crash?

These attacks on the poor, rather than on poverty, are not peculiar to Tennessee. In fact, similar concepts circulate among political and policy elites in Washington. For Ayn Rand acolytes, Wall Street’s reckless, greedy casinos couldn’t possibly be the real reason the economy crashed. After all, the rich get rich because they are terrific at what they do. We should reward these creators, not blame them for their foresight, their ingenuity and their obvious success. The blame instead should fall on the poor — the takers — and on the collectivist government liberals who cater to them. Didn’t the government force banks to put unqualified poor people in homes they couldn’t afford? (It doesn’t matter that the data shows that low-income buyers who gained loans through the Community Readjustment Act didn’t default in higher numbers than anyone else. The idea of blaming the poor has power.)

Blaming low-income people for chronic unemployment is the next move. As the rate stays stubbornly high (precisely because all Republicans and even a few Democrats don’t want the government in the business of job creation) we hear talk of “structural” unemployment. That’s code for the jobs would be there if only the workers were qualified. But you know, those lower-income workers just don’t have the skills and work habits to compete in our globalized economy. Even older middle-class workers are hopelessly out of date. So there’s really nothing government can do about it.

The final twist is to claim that the richest country in human history doesn’t have the means to eradicate poverty. Instead, we are told, rising debt is forcing us to tighten our belts — rather, we need to tighten the belts of the poor by taking away a few more dollars from Medicaid and Social Security.

How to justify meanness?

It’s not easy to be cruel to someone who is down and out. After all, most of us feel ashamed when walking by a homeless person or watching kids crammed into over-crowded classrooms. It requires several psychological twists and turns to make life even harder for low-income Americans.
•You have to blame low-income parents for their own economic problems. Even if the unemployment rate is sky-high it must be the poor person’s fault.
•You need to feel superior — that somehow you got to where you are today not by an accident of birth but rather by your own hard labors. Anyone not as successful as you, by definition, is inferior.
•You have to believe that meanness really is tough love — that by taking benefits away from the poor you are actually helping them on the road to self sufficiency.
•It’s helpful to have access to the broader Randian/libertarian philosophy that argues all forms of collective government action are an attack on freedom. In this view, altruism is seen as a curse that justifies collective government programs which essentially steal money from the makers and to waste on the takers. All collective caring by the state, therefore, is evil, so that all support for the poor via government is evil as well.
•It’s psychologically crucial to have your prejudices confirmed by charismatic alchemists like Ayn Rand, Rand Paul and Paul Ryan who peddle selfishness as the highest form of morality (although only Ayn Rand had the guts to say it so bluntly).

Is Washington locked into increasing inequality?

While the Republicans in Congress are committed to supporting the rich and crushing the poor, smug Democrats can too easily look down upon the bumbling Tennessee legislators. Tie welfare to school success? How crude. But many of these same Democrats also are totally in sync with the Wall Street hucksters who have, for a generation, siphoned off America’s wealth into their bottomless pockets. In fact, both parties again are in competition for Wall Street campaign cash as if nothing much has happened. And both parties clearly are unwilling to break up the big banks, cap obscene financial incomes, or create public banks to serve the public interest.

Washington politicians and pundits from Obama on down (with very few exceptions) are enthralled by Wall Street wizardry. Making a million dollars an hour no longer seems strange or repugnant. Too big to fail, jail and regulate are just the natural order of things. In fact, more than a few public servants can’t wait to race through that revolving door to get in on the big casino games.

This should tell us that the path to social justice requires a new political movement that operates outside the two great corporate parties.

Is it too late?

I ran into a young woman who is very concerned by the enormous gap she sees between life on campus and the hardships of the low-income people. She wants to know what she can do with her life to really change things.

What can we say? I look back over a lifetime in the cause of social justice and I don’t have much to show for it — more war, more poverty, more inequality, more disinvestment in critical human infrastructure. Yes, we’ve made great strides on gender, sexual preference and overt racial discrimination compared to a generation ago. But how can we explain why America has the world’s highest incarceration rates? Why couldn’t we prevent a criminal justice system from sending 40% of young black males to prison? How, on our watch, did our relatively egalitarian country develop the most obscene wealth gap in the world? How is it possible that so many of our cities are in worse shape than a generation ago? It’s almost to impossible to comprehend, and even harder to change.

But that young woman already senses that we have no choice but to try. And that requires building a movement that targets the core of the problem — the systems that allow the economic royalists and their political minions to hijack our country.

It’s a long-term project. After all, it required almost two generations of painstaking work for the Ayn Rand right to take over the national debate. It may take just as long to recapture it. Let’s hope there are enough caring young women and men who still have a sense of the common good. Altruism may have died in Galt’s Gulch, but it’s still alive and well in the hearts of those who share a passion for justice, even in Tennessee.
 
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