‘It just doesn’t work’
Sitting in the capitol’s vaulted lobby, Goossen, now a senior fellow at the Kansas Center for Economic Growth, has little time for Laffer’s arguments, and says that the Trump administration’s recent presentation gave him the shivers.
When Brownback outlined his plan in 2012, he, too, said the tax cuts would pay for themselves. “He too said the tax cuts would benefit everybody, [that] they would be be ‘a shot of adrenaline to the heart’ of the Kansan economy,” said Goossen.
Instead, Goossen claims, the money has gone to a small group of wealthy Kansans while the state’s budget has been left with a roughly $1bn shortfall. Its school system, once its crown jewel, has suffered year after year of cuts, and its savings are gone. The non-partisan Tax Policy Center calculates Trump’s tax plan would cost $6.2tn over the first decade.
“We are a cautionary tale. It sounds great, everybody gets a tax cut and it’ll balance – but it just doesn’t work,” said Goossen.
Campaigning for re-election in 2014, Brownback pledged his tax plans would add 100,000 new jobs over four years. By March this year, the state had added just 12,400 private-sector jobs. Kansas isn’t even keeping up with its neighbors. Hiring in Kansas increased by 0.3% in the last year; Missouri’s growth rate over that same period was 1.4%, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.