Another Failed Republican "Experiment"

The relentless war on middle income Americans by hyper wealthy plutocrats and their political shills, as symbolized by Wisconsin Gov. Scott "Koch Head" Walker (see post below), has taken a serious toll.  In Kansas, the right-wing Republican Gov. Sam Brownback has crippled his state through reckless corporate and other tax cuts over three years that have forced the closing of schools and elimination of some public services.  Now, facing the collapse of the state's public services, Brownback and his Republican-controlled state legislature decided yesterday to raise state sales taxes to help fill the $400 million budget deficit.  Sales taxes are, for the most part, regressive, placing the broadest burden on lower income people, and are the type of taxes that Rethuglicans reach for in emergency situations.

The Kansas experience is another example of the failure of right-wing, supply side (or "trickle down") economic policies that for 30 years have caused the greatest gap in wealth in this country since the Gilded Age of the 1890s.  David Madland's article in Salon details the failure of trickle down economics to do anything more than transfer the wealth of lower and middle income families to the economic elites, who use their wealth to influence politics in their favor (gutting government, lowering their own taxes, etc.). The Republican / New Confederate / Stupid Party has gone in the tank for trickle down economics, believing that if the wealthiest corporations and people do well -- extremely well -- then everyone else does, too.  Cutting taxes on the elites has not produced an economic boom, either in the 1980s or in Kansas of 2015.