Wednesday, April 20, 2016

What's the matter with Kansas?

In 2010 Tea Party favorite Sam Brownback was elected governor and he had Republican majorities in both houses of its legislature. The GOP program was put in place. What happened, you ask?
The result of the GOP tax cuts is significantly lower employment growth than in the national economy. By the way, lower income tax and higher sales taxes, a very regressive tax policy, has led to a persistent overestimation of revenue, and tax shortfalls that led to spending cuts, which in part explains the employment problems (see here). And that is essentially the same program that the 3 national candidates are defending this year. Supply-side economics has been debunked several times, but it surprisingly survives. Zombienomics.

2 comments:

  1. Why do you think such a simple graph constitutes a debunking? Many different factors affect economic growth.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The simple graph alone doesn't of course. But it does provide good visual aid ;)

      Note that this claim that cutting taxes leads to higher revenue (which clearly failed in Kansas where revenue has fallen short all the time) is the central story. Of course if you are forced to cut spending, employment cannot grow much.

      Delete

Atonella Stirarti's Godley-Tobin Lecture

There was a problem during the 7th Godley-Tobin Lecture. I disconnected everyone when I was trying to fix a problem with Professor Stirati&#...