Yes, once again, Kansas, Kansas Republicans and their budget ideas are in the news. Just for all the wrong reasons:
Republicans are the real wealth redistributors
Kansas and other state governments are seizing money from middle-class workers to finance tax cuts for the wealthy
Their long-discredited ideas, inherited from Ronnie the Raygun and all that "trickle down" ideas and nonsense put Kansas infamously in debt and the news while California, doing exactly the opposite, is taking care of its debts, paying its bills, rebuilding infrastructure and paving a positive path to the future:
Welcome to Brownbackistan:
In 2008, then-candidate Barack Obama was lambasted for supposedly endorsing policies of wealth redistribution. The right feared that under an Obama presidency, Washington would use federal power to take money from some Americans and give it to others. Yet, only a few years later, the most explicit examples of such redistribution are happening in the states, and often at the urging of Republicans.
The most illustrative example began in 2012, when Kansas’ Republican Gov. Sam Brownback signed a landmark bill that delivered big tax cuts to high-income earners and businesses. Less than two years after that tax cut, the state’s income tax revenues plummeted by a quarter-billion dollars — and now Brownback is pushing to use money for public employees’ pensions to instead cover the state’s ensuing budget shortfalls.
Brownback’s proposal: Slash the state’s required pension contribution by $40 million to balance the state budget, even though Kansas already has one of the worst-funded pension systems in the nation.
Brownback defended his proposal to take money from middle-class state workers and use it to effectively finance his tax cuts for the wealthy. He told the Wichita Eagle: “It’s kind of, uh, well where are you going to go for the funds? And I don’t like it, but it’s kind of what’s your other option if you don’t hit K-12 and higher ed with allotments?”
See, if government officials, using our government, take money from the lower and middle and working classes and give it to the already-wealthy and corporations, it's okay. It's all well and good. In fact, it's "good business sense" by their way of thinking.
But try taking money from the wealthy and those same corporations and giving it to the middle, lower and working classes? Why, that's WEALTH REDISTRIBUTION! Worse, it's Communism! It's Socialism! It's "un-American"!
What's additionally ironic about all this is that the Kansas governor did all this tax slashing and attempts at redistribution of wealth---all on the backs and pocketbooks of the Kansas people--in his now clearly vain attempts to gain the presidency, it's clear. Fortunately, that's one thing that won't go any further, anyway, what with the financial, economic and debt debacles he's created in his home state now.
That, in fact, is the only positive thing to come out of Kansas' mess.
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