State Senator Kurt Schaefer (R-19) wants to be Missouri’s next Attorney General. He wants it a lot since he announced his plans to run in 2016 over a year ago. Consequently he’s been very busy  getting his name out before the public. But not just any public. His constituency of choice seems to be the reddest dregs of this increasingly red state. It’s  hard to think of just about any rightwing bandwagon he hasn’t tried to ride since declaring his candidacy, no matter how rickety:

Tax Cuts for Rich Folks: Evidence suggests that Schaefer supports the Kansas tax “experiment” and would be willing to beggar Missouri’s middle and working class in order to give big tax cuts to rich folks and their businesses. When state GOPers recently fêted Kansas Governor Sam Brownback, Schaefer, who is currently the Missouri Senate Appropriations Committee chairman, opined that the governor had “some really compelling numbers.” This is in spite of what Politico has dubbed the “Brownback effect,” observing that “Republicans once idolized Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback as a tax cutting superstar – now he’s a lesson in what not to do.” Evidently Schaeffer didn’t get the message. Or else he actually takes seriously dishonest statistics of the sort that billionaire Rex Sinquefield published in Forbes Magazine in order to make the Kansas experiment look like it is succeeding, or at least not as disastrous as it is proving to be.

Social Spending Cuts: Schaeffer, like so many GOPers before him, seems to think it’s okay to fund tax cuts – favored by rich political donors like Rex Sinquefield – by cutting the ground out from under those who lack the wherewithal and the influence to fund his climb to the top of the Missouri political heap. He’s proposed cutting $130 million from the already meager amount allocated by the House to social services, health and mental health services. He says that the agencies are wasteful and that cuts are necessary to slow their growth.

It is true that Missouri’s social services are currently not functioning too well. Ill-considered cuts and the resulting “reforms” over the past few years have taken a steep toll, a situation that many take as evidence that they need more rather than less money. According to figures supplied by state budget officials, Schaefer’s claims of waste perhaps reflect his ideological biases rather than a close analysis of the real-life situation. As for out-of-control growth? Wouldn’t you expect that as Missouri continues its GOP-led transformation into a poverty stricken backwater, one might expect demand for services to increase – a demand, that folks like Schaefer are determined not to meet.

Guns “R”Us: Schaefer was one of the motivating forces behind Missouri’s Amendment 5, a constitutional amendment voted in by the gun-mad hordes who dominate mid-term elections in Missouri. This amendment, under the rubric of an “inalienable” right to own guns, was so badly written that it has made it impossible to bar convicted felons from gun ownership. As the St Louis Post-Dispatch described it, Schaefer’s decision “to start acting like a pandering fool” has had a scary, but entirely predictable – and predicted – result:

… .In a state in which there are more gun deaths than traffic deaths, in which toddlers are grabbing mommy and daddy’s guns and firing away, in which cities are being told by a Legislature there is nothing they can do about gun violence, now convicted felons can own guns and there is nothing the police can do about it.

Again, let me reiterate. This guy’s a lawyer – and he even wants to be the state’s main lawyer. If his legal acumen was insufficient to locate the problems in what was essentially his baby, a lot of other folks pointed them out before it was too late to fix them. Now Schaefer’s twisting and turning, trying to find a way to prove that “Amendment 5 doesn’t mean what it says.” Sadly, the courts don’t agree.

So stop and think. Either Schaefer is, as the Post-Dispatch implies, a spineless panderer, or he’s out-and-out stupid. He’s either taken in by or cynically peddling obviously failing, ideologically driven voodoo economic theories, GOP welfare queen vilification, and the Guns equal God ideology of hardcore gun crazies. Either way what rational, unbiased person could trust him to act in the best interests of the people of Missouri – either in the State Senate where he now works his backwards magic, or as Attorney General? Is the distinction even meaningful? If the sum of a politician’s major legislative efforts are stupid and harmful then it’s doesn’t make much difference if the motivation is incompetence or venality. For all practical purposes that individual is a fool.

Ed Kilgore of The Washington Monthly draws attention today to an article in Salon on the dire straits Sam Brownback’s no-tax strategy has created in Kansas. Things are really, really bad:

Here’s what Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback’s supply side economic experiment has wrought: The Republican’s massive tax cuts for the wealthy and businesses will cost the state a projected $5 billion in revenue over seven years; by this summer, legislators must address a $278 million revenue shortfall, which Brownback is looking to fill in part by slashing vital infrastructure spending and reducing contributions to the state’s already underfunded pension plan. Meanwhile, the tax cuts haven’t delivered the economic “shot of adrenaline” Brownback promised. Kansas’ GDP growth lags behind that of other states in the region, its rate of job growth is slower than that of the nation as a whole, and the state’s per-capita income ranking hasn’t changed since the tax cuts were enacted in 2012. Kansas is ascending the national rankings on one measure, however: Last year, it ranked seventh in the nation among states residents left.

Now comes the really astounding news. We know that despite the early signs warning of Kansas’ pending economic decline – make that plunge,  the Missouri legislature took steps last year to take us in the same direction by overriding the Governojr’s veto of a disastrous tax-cut bill. And guess what? That tax cut hasn’t even kicked in yet and we’re already seeing that the state isn’t taking in enough revenue to keep the store open:

— The The Missouri Department of Transportation has indicated that they will only be able to handle routine maintenance for a fraction of the state’s roads and highways.

— On the heels of the President’s promotion of free community college, we learn that the state’s A+ program, which aimed to lessen the expense of two-year education for Missouri students, will probably have to be scaled back because it is so severely underfunded.

— Last year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service reported that Missouri refused food aid to more needy people than any other state in the nation. This failure to meet basic social safety net needs was a direct result of an “overhaul” of the Department of Social Services meant to cut costs and, of course, “increase efficiency.” Unfortunately, in common with so many moves to increase efficiency by reducing resources, the result is poor or non-existent service.

— The same problems that affect food stamp distribution characterize the administration of Missouri Medicaid.

There’s lots more if you’re looking for evidence of decline. What you wanna bet tax cuts won’t fix those problems here anymore than they did in Kansas? I could write all day about the problems that Missourians face thanks to the prevalent Republican ideology that views paying for our collective needs via taxation as the original scourge of Satan.

The worst part of this situation is that although this cut-taxes or, alternatively, institute-a-regressive-sales-tax policy-making is failing in all those states trying it, the GOP everywhere continues to tirelessly push forward with more of the same. Reports are that Brownback plans to double down and totally beggar Kansas. Here in Missouri, State Senator Eric Schmidt has filed a bill to make last year’s tax cut even more draconian:

Mr. Schmitt’s Senate Bill 4, pre-filed in early December, would increase the size of the $621 million tax cut, perhaps to $1 billion or more. The top personal income rate would be reduced from 6 percent to 5 percent, instead of the 5.5 percent enacted by last year’s tax-cut bill. The tax rate for corporate “pass-through” income treated as personal income – by sole proprietors, partnerships, limited liability corporations and subchapter S corporations – would be cut to 50 percent. Last year’s bill cut it to 75 percent.

There are other signs that our intrepid Republican legislators haven’t got a clue. Faced with a big, soon to be visible problem with the state’s transportation infrastructure, there doesn’t seem to be any will to abandon the GOP’s collective no-tax delusion. There’s the inevitable talk about robbing poverty stricken Peter to pay pauper Paul, that is, securing transportation funds, for instance, by cutting the resources of other bare-bones agencies and programs. To no one’s surprise, there seem to be murmurings that we’ll have to revisit that sales tax that was defeated last year. The hope seems to be that folks will have learned their lesson and will finally just suck it up as long as the GOP stands firm against fair, progressive taxes. As Luke Brinker notes in the Salon article:

A study released this week underscores one of the most pernicious effects of such a tax regime: It exacerbates inequality. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that “[v]irtually every state’s tax system is fundamentally unfair,” with state and local taxes eating disproportionately into lower-income workers’ wages. But the effect was far worse in states with low or no income tax. In the Institute’s “Terrible 10″ states, the bottom quintile of wage earners pay up to seven times as much of their income in taxes as the top one percent does. The worst offender was Washington state, which has no individual income tax. The remaining states on the list were Florida, Texas, South Dakota, and Tennessee, which all lack individual income taxes; Illinois and Indiana, which tax individual incomes at a flat rate; and Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Kansas.

I’ve got a bad feeling that we’ll be able to add Missouri to that list sometime in the near future. But hey! We may be on the fast path to Poverty Flats, but we can take solace in the fact that we’ll be living the Republican, low-tax dream on the way.

So on the heels of a tax cut for the wealthy that insults every middle and working class person in the state of Missouri, the state legislature has the chutzpah to put a sales tax increase on the fall ballot in order to pay for transportation infrastructure. This tax, in common with sales taxes in general, falls most heavily on those who can least afford it. Rich folks who have the means to subsidize politicians and businesses that depend on our transportation infrastructure to thrive  will once again benefit from the poor man’s mite.

And our Democatic Senator, the wealthy Claire McCaskill, is all for taxing the  little guy while the fat cats get off. She thinks the sales tax is overdue, should have been enacted last year, although she realizes that, coming as it does on the heels of the rich man’s tax cut, the optics aren’t too great:

“Is it my first choice on how to fund transportation? Probably not. But it doesn’t mean that I’m not willing to support it. I will support it. Because we’ve got to get some additional revenue for our roads in Missouri,” McCaskill said. “They want to talk about what makes Missouri an attractive business climate, well funding higher education and having good roads and bridges are way more important than Rex Sinquefield’s plan to do away with everyone’s taxes entirely and make us all into Kansas.”

I admit it. McCaskill’s absolutely right about the need for revenue. But since I’ve been in Missouri I’ve seen one serious need after another addressed by proposals to increase the sales taxes that hit the poor man disproportionately – while the top tax rate in the state remained obscenely low. Now it’s even lower. If Missourians take McCaskill’s lead next November, we’ll continue to be stuck with ever more unfair sales taxes every time a new need is identified – desperate need, that is, since the GOP-dominated legislature is more than content to let the social and physical infrastructure of the state slide until the conditions are so dire action is unavoidable. Every time Democrats go along with a sales tax when serious, progressive tax reform is what is called for, we are helping to put finis to the vision of a state that is just and where prosperity is shared by all.

The Missourians who vote for these GOP bozos need to learn what happens when their elected representatives chose to favor wealthy political donors over the working people of the state. The lawmakers that enacted the mindnumbingly stupid tax cut need to be held accountable for their shortsided, ideologically driven behavior. That will only happen if we don’t bail them out by putting the burden on those least able to carry it. Sure, it’ll hurt for a while, but it’s the only way we’ll change the direction of our state.

No on the sales tax may even benefit the state’s economy since those at the bottom end of the economic spectrum tend to spend the money that they manage to keep in their pockets, stimulating growth. Rich folks, on the other hand, tend to sit on their excess moolah.

A headline in yesterday’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch says it all. Describing the recent Jefferson-Jackson Dinner, the headline proclaimed that “Democrats defend party principles at dinner here.” That’s right, not “assert” party principles, but, like sniveling losers, they attempt to “defend” themselves from the bullies who are picking on us all and who, if things continue as they are, will probably get away with it. Claire McCaskill is willing to concede defeat, leaving us worse off in order to deal with only one of the many problems the state faces – a serious problem, but if we endorse her postion, we’re shutting the door to a real solution in the future, a solution that is fair for all. We’re also telling the big baddies in the legislature that there’ll be no price to pay for taking us in the wrong direction. Vote no on the sales tax for the sake of Missouri’s future.

Yesterday Missouri’s GOP engineered the passage of a draconian tax cut for wealthy Missourians. The justification? To promote growth.

Today the Los Angeles Times cites new research from the University of Wisconsin that radical taxcutting and similar “pro-business policies don’t really contribute to economic growth. They just make the rich richer, which is not the same thing at all.” Read the details here and weep. Of course, if you’re ready for the unabridged version, you can always purchase a copy of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century and get the same message with massively more data to support the conclusions.

Two voter ID bills introduced in the Missouri House, HB1073 and HJR47, designed by Republicans to limit voting access by Democratic leaning citizens, have advanced to the Senate where Republicans, who are all hot and bothered by non-existent voter fraud, are very likely to send them on to the Governor for what is just as likely to be another veto.

However, as Henry Waters III notes in the Columbia Tribune, judges in Arkansas, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania have found similar voter ID laws unconstitutional on the grounds that “Photo ID laws are an interference with voters’ rights not warranted as protection against voter fraud.” Doesn’t deter our lawmakers from pressing on though. Missouri may be the show-me state, but it’s awful hard to show folks something if they aren’t capable of drawing the right conclusions from the display.

Both the Missouri House and Senate have okayed similar legislation that attempts to nullify federal gun laws (but only, as Brian Nieves insists, the unconstitutional laws), punish federal agents that attempt to enforce those laws, and permit open carry – even in jurisdictions that want to prohibit the open display of guns by armed yahoos.

Guess what? Sane folks know that state lawmakers don’t get to decide which federal laws are unconstitutional and if the final bill survives a guaranteed veto by the Governor, it’ll head straight for the courts – and cost Missouri a bundle in the process. In the District Of Columbia v. Heller decision of 2008, the Supreme Court reaffirmed that the 2nd amendment permits the regulation of firearms – a point articulated by even the über conservative activist judge, Antonin Scalia . On a more immediate level, the mayors of St. Louis and Kansas City are concerned about the potential of this law to endanger cooperative federal and state task forces working to combat gang and gun violence. As for open carry, apart from the disrespect the law shows for local self-determination, the oft-stated rationale, that more guns means less crime, has been shown to be essentially false.

Have you noticed a pattern here?  The Republicans who mostly run our state spend lots of time legislating from perspectives that can’t stand the the test of fact-based reality. The result? Counter-productive, costly, and even unconstitutional laws that have the potential to seriously harm Missourians, destabilize our civic and social life, and debase our democratic institutions. The folks who stand to gain? Members of the state’s oligarchy with money to burn and the politicians who want to help them burn it. Each of the examples above either constitutes a direct giveaway to Republican political patrons, or are useful in either directly (voter ID) or indirectly (pandering to gun-related paranoia) securing Republican power. We’re governed by power-mad, corrupt (what happened to those ethics bills?) fantasists. As a result we’re left to cope with what promises to be a consistently deteriorating reality.  

Today I learned that state Rep. Scot Fitzpatrick (R-158), who represents predominantly rural Barry County, is sponsoring a bill, HB1355, that would exempt day care businesses in similar counties from state regulation, while allowing the local jurisdictions to enact alternative rules should they feel the need for any regulation. To put this in perspective, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that “all but six of 56 child care deaths in Missouri from 2007 through July 2011 occurred in unlicensed home day cares.” Recently, one of those deaths, that of baby Izabella Moore, has been in the news as her parents seek to unseal records pertaining to her death in an unlicensed Perry County day care facility in which fourteen children were left in the care of one adult. Indications are that the child was left unattended in a basement for several hours during which time she died. Not surprising given those circumstances, though the fact that the unlicensed day care in question is still operating is indeed perplexing.

But Rep. Fitzpatrick does actually have an reasonable case to make:

The way Fitzpatrick sees it, most child care providers in his area cannot afford to come into compliance with state licensing standards.

He said they lack the staff to meet state standards for adult-to-child ratios. He said they can’t survive under the state’s enrollment limits, which cap their number of paying clients.

He’s right. Barry County, which is typical of many rural Missouri counties, has a poverty rate of 18%; the median household income is about $38,000. Women make up half the population and it’s likely, given the economic make-up of the county, that many Barry County mothers have to work if the family is to survive. It’s also likely that many of those families can’t afford to meet the costs for quality child care – which, in turn, means that there will be few day cares that offer such care.

Nevertheless, if Rep. Fitzpatrick is right about the conditions that lead to substandard child care operations, he is not right about the remedy. Wouldn’t this be the time to propose beefing up state child care assistance? It is certainly true that Missouri hasn’t been overdoing such assistance:

Unfortunately the State of Missouri has one of the weakest Child Care Assistance Programs in the country.  Missouri’s eligibility requirements for Child Care Assistance are among the most stringent of all the states (you have to be poorer than families in all but four other state to qualify for assistance in Missouri) and the state’s assistance payments are the lowest.  In Missouri child care providers are reimbursed for providing services at only about half the market rate.  The federal standard for reimbursement of providers is at 75 percent of the market rate.  Missouri has not increased its child care reimbursement rate since 1999.  […]

It is equally true that, as the Missouri based Vision for Children at Risk (VCR) notes, that quality child care “is critical to the development and well-being of children,” a fact that affects the well-being of our society as a whole. The VCR also adds that the purpose of state funded child care assistance is “is to enable families to gain employment and remain employed” while securing acceptable care for their children. I may be wrong, but I think I’ve been hearing lots of Republicans gassing on and on about how the poor have to work. Why then make them choose between the well-being of their children and the need to feed them? Could it be because nobody thinks these folks matter? Rep. Fitzpatrick’s legislative remedy certainly implies that poor people in poor jurisdictions don’t deserve quality care for their children.

Rep. Ftizpatrick is, however, willing to go out on a limb to provide relief to one class of Missourians, namely the wealthy. He was vigorous in his defense of last year’s misguided and ultimately defeated tax cut for the rich, HB253, and will undoubtedly be hitting the hustings to campaign for this year’s variant of tax relief for the rich and connected. That he can do so while throwing up his hands, saying nothing can be done about poverty and the state of child care for the poor except relegate their children to the type of day care that might be the norm in a third world country says volumes about the type of country that Republicans want us to become. If I didn’t think it was hopeless, I’d say somebody ought to describe the benefits of progressive tax reforms to the Representative while disabusing him of some of the rightwing trickle down mythology that allows the wealthy to make out like bandits at the expense of the rest of us.

One last fact that should excite wonder: Barry county votes overwhelmingly Republican and it’s more than likely that Rep. Fitzpatrick’s disdain for the children of his constituents will be spun as concern for their plight – and most of them, desperate to get along during hard times, will go along with the spin. Lots of them will also think that he’s right to go after taxes – even though many of them will end up on the short end of the stick. Because P.T. Barnum was right: there’s a sucker born every minute.    

Last year Governor Nixon froze $400 million worth of spending allocated for education, state services and capital improvements. He took this action in order to make it clear that efforts by the legislature to override his veto of HB253 would result in long-term damage to state revenue that would have to be offset by reallocating funds:

“The choice before us is stark and clear,” Nixon told reporters.  “Members of the General Assembly can either support House Bill 253 or they can support education, but they can’t do both.”

The Governor’s dramatic action, which simply underlined the detailed evidence he had already made available to support his arguments against the tax-cut, seemed to have worked. HB253 went down in figurative flames, enabling Nixon to free up some of the frozen funds.

Given the braying about spending offsets for every piece of social services spending that we get from national Republican legislators, you’d expect our GOP homies would understand how it works and man up. But no way. Nixon’s strategy enraged plenty of Republicans who were confident that they were going to be able to deliver a juicy tax-cut for their corporate patrons. Who, after all, likes to be outplayed, especially when, to all appearances, one holds all the cards?

But elephants never forget, and state GOPers now think they’ve figured out a way to get payback and thwart future efforts to make education the topic when they want it to be nothing but tax-cuts:

The Missouri Constitution allows the governor to control the rate appropriations are spent and to reduce spending when state revenues are less than the estimate upon which the budget is based.

Republican Sen. Ryan Silvey, of Kanas City, has proposed a constitutional amendment that would exclude spending through the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education from that budget-trimming authority. A constitutional amendment would require a statewide vote if it passes the Legislature.

There  you have it: Rep. Silvey’s SJR45 , a tit-for-tat move that, by putting a constitutional amendment on the state ballot, seeks to tilt the playing board for future tax policy games. It’s an interesting move since Missouri House Speaker Tim Jones claimed that the Governor was violating the constitution last year. The fact that nobody took the Governor to court and that the GOP is now hoping to ask Missourians to amend their constitution, suggests that they didn’t really think the constitutional objection had much weight. Republicans were simply playing the empty constitutional card that they always pull when they’ve not got anything else up their sleeves.

Although the true purpose of of Silvey’s gambit is clear, he also wants to pose as a stalwart supporter of education by ignoring the context the Governor’s actions, the threat posed by the Republican corporate tax-cut, tweeting “Today I filed SJR45 to amend the MO Constitution to prohibit the Governor from withholding money from schools. Education is too important. ” Damn straight education’s important. That’s why the Governor did what he did.

Silvey later added, “My SJR45 will finally remove school kids from being a piece on the Governor’s political chess board.” I don’t know about you, but I’d be glad to let the Governor use my children as pieces on his “political chess board” if it saved their schools from Republican raids on the state’s revenue stream. Good schools cost money. Heck, even mediocre schools cost money. Tax-cuts for corporations and rich people take the money we need for schools, among other things, and, to be honest,  they haven’t done much for the economy of states that have beggared themselves through  this type of tax-cutting. What we ought to be asking Silvey is, if he’s so big on eduction, why isn’t he proposing a way to secure some new revenue to pay for it?

Nobody wants to hurt education and, in general, at any rate, everybody likes the idea of tax-cuts, but the two are tightly linked in Missouri, a state that currently can’t manage to properly fund its schools. Why does it bother Republicans so much when this linkage is made explicit? Why can’t they be upfront about the consequences of their low- or no-tax philosophy? And finally, why should anyone vote for Silvey’s constitutional amendment, which is no more than a cynical effort to checkmate a Governor who’s trying against all odds to improve Missouri’s mediocre educational system.

 

Remember how state Republicans tried to justify their give-to-the-rich tax bill, HB253, last session by claiming that if we didn’t drastically cut our state income taxes for businesses, we’d lose out to Kansas where income taxes were going bye-bye? We’ll undoubtedly hear more of the same nonsense when the GOP tries to defend the panoply of revenue-reducing bills that have already been filed for the upcoming 2014 legislaive session.

The fact that Kansas has had to revise budget projections for 2014 downward by more than 7% and that folks in the state are showing signs of buyer’s remorse when it comes to Kansas Governor Brownback’s tax policies will probably do little to diminish the Missouri GOP’s desperate search for a rationnale for their revenue-reduction fever. In fact, Missoui’s political über sugar-daddy, Rex Sinquefield, whose lavish financial donations help inflame that fever, has already published a counterfactual case in Forbes Magazine for revenue reductions in Missouri to equal those in Kansas.

When I’ve written about the effects of tax cuts in Kansas in the past, I’ve noted that the state has tried – unsuccessfully – to compensate for lost tax revenue with higher sales taxes – one of the revenue remedies proposed by past Sinquefield tax-cutting ballot initiative efforts in Missouri. Another effect, though, that has not received much attention is the effect on property taxes. The Tax Policy Center of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution notes in a recent report (pdf) that:

The variation in property tax burdens across counties is almost exclusively because of across-state variation, rather than within-state variation. What this means is, variation in property tax burdens is almost exclusively the result of differences in state tax regimes, not county-level differences in tax rates or housing prices.

So, given the “tax regime” in Kansas, it’s not surprising that property taxes in Kansas have increased over the past several years and are now a major source of revenue:

Property tax is the #1 source of tax revenue in Kansas, accounting for over 31% of all taxes collected in fiscal year 2012 by state and local governments. Data collected from the Kansas Department of Revenue, Property Valuation Division shows that property taxes increased 102% between 1997 and 2012. Over the same period population increased 11% and inflation increased 40%.

How do property taxes in Missouri compare to those in Kansas? This interactive map which tracks property taxes at the county level makes it clear such taxes across Kansas are significantly higher than in Missouri. But if you want numbers, the related brief (pdf, see Table 1), tells us that the mean property tax as a percent of home value in Kansas is 1.39%, in Missouri, it’s .97%.

To put the comparison in even more concrete form, look at a few border counties on the map. For example, in Linn County in Kansas, the average amount of property taxes paid is $1,167 and the average home value is $98,000. Across the border in Missouri’s Bates County, the average property tax paid is $717 while the average home value is $103,100. In these two counties, taxes paid as a share of home values stand at 1.19% in Kansas and .74% in the Missouri county. Similar discrepancies prevail across the two states with the exceptions of a few counties around Kansas City where values are relatively even.

The conclusion is clear: it costs regular, everyday people more to live in Kansas. Property taxes are higher, sales taxes are higher. Additionally, everyday taxpayers aren’t getting much for their money apart from a state government struggling with budget shortfalls, resulting in problems like that posed by an educational system facing massively lowered funding. And, if nothing changes, it’s only going to get worse:

… there is evidence that local governments are feeling enormous pressure to make up for reductions in state support by increasing their property tax rates. Hannes Zacharias, Johnson County’s Manager said, “Indeed, we are at the end of the food chain, and we’re the ones who have to clean up the mess.”  And as the Associated Press reports: “the county has lost state revenue for jobs such as inspecting sewer septic tanks for new residents in rural areas. In addition, furloughs in district court operations caused by limited state funds mean defendants must stay in county jails longer while awaiting trial, a cost picked up by local governments.”

Is this what those Missourians who put the GOP in control of our state legislature really want? Bad schools, bad services, higher property and sales taxes? And if they do, are the rest of us going to let them get away with it? If the answer is “no,” remember that 2014 is nearly here.  

 

When I recently wrote about the Missouri GOP’s stubborn attempt to render unto Rex Sinquefield what – by virtue of his checkbook – is Rex Sinquefield’s, namely one more dreary iteration of their efforts to reduce or eliminate taxes for the wealthy, I also noted that a similar experiment seemed to be tanking in Kansas – even to such an extent that the popularity of Kansas GOP Governor Sam Brownbeck was in the pits.

Imagine, then, my amazement, when I learned via an opinion piece in The Kansas City Star that there are folks that think Kansas is in exemplary shape. None other than Missouri’s ever-generous billionaire, Rex Sinquefield, seems to have informed readers of Forbes Magazine that “a close look at the data backs up the economic projections of Brownback’s visionary leadership.”

So who’s right? Me? Or Rex Snquefield? The Star‘s contributing author, I’m happy to say, backs up my contentions about the state of Kansas, pointing out that, contrary to Sinquefield’s claims, the state’s economy is “tracking most of the rest of the nation” with “no discernable jolt upward.”

What interests me, though, is the way that Mr. Sinquefield, borrowing a tactic from so many movers and shakers on the right, takes a kernel of truth and by either twisting it or ignoring other equally relevant facts, begins to run a premature victory lap  – with a view to taking a similar lope around the track in Missouri once his pets in the legislature enact his long-sought after rich-man’s tax cut. Not for nothing was his Forbes article titled “How Kansas Governor Brownback Schooled Missouri On Tax Cuts, And Showed The Region How To Grow.”

Mr. Sinquefield asserts that “lower income tax rates have in fact stimulated the economy by reducing the price both of work and conducting business in the state.” Half true. The cost of work – what people get paid – did decrease. A Center for Tax Policy report cites “Bureau of Labor statistics that showed Kansas was one of 20 states where inflation-adjusted average weekly earnings of private employees decreased between May 2012 and last May.” This fact fits well with other reports that document conistent increases during Brownback’s tenure in the number of Kansans living in poverty.

What’s not so true is the part about lower income tax rates stimulating the economy. While some business organizations have upped Kansas “business-friendly” type of rating, based mostly on government policies rather than results, recent economic reports aren’t so glowing:

… another report shows Kansas lagging most states in economic growth from February to May and predicted it will trail in the next six months.

“Most states improved over the past quarter; only Alaska, Kansas, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Wyoming experienced declines,” said the State Economic Monitor report by the Tax Policy Center, which provides independent analyses of tax issues.

The report cited an economic growth measure produced by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia that combines non-farm employment, average manufacturing hours worked, the state’s unemployment rate and real wages.

The Philadelphia Fed also produces an index that measures future economic activity for six months, and again Kansas was among the bottom states.

If  you’re interested in going into Mr. Sinquefield’s claims in greater detail, you might be enlightened by what he fails to tell us, for instance, about the unemployment rate in Kansas. He reports correctly that Kansas unemployment fell from 7% in 2011 when Brownback took office to 5.8%, a decline of 1.2 percentage points. Not so spectacular, however, when you consider that during the same period, Missouri’s unemployment rate fell 2.1 percentage points. Apart from the fact that the Kansas jobless rate is actually currently 5.9%, what Sinquefield also fails to tell us is that the Kansas number reflects an increase in unemployment, from 5.5% in January. This loss of jobs occurred during a time that saw national unemployment numbers decreasing from 7.9% to 7.3%.

I don’t know about you, but when I took a closer look at Mr. Sinquefield’s claims and did a little research, I still wasn’t too impressed with Kansas’ economic growth record over the past couple of years. I will admit, though, that if I were naively reading Sinquefield’s Forbes encomium to Governor Brownback, I might think that he was on to something. Which takes us back to those polls that show Brownback tanking in Kansas. One lesson that one can draw from Mr. Brownback’s fall from popular grace is that folks learn from experience. Another lesson, though, seeks to account for the 30-some percent who still approve of his performance – and goes to show that if you jigger the numbers skillfully enough, you actually can fool some of the people all of the time.

Today an article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch confirmed my fears that although HB253, the corporate tax-cut bill has been laid to rest at last, it will be resurrected poste haste in January when the legislature reconvenes:

On a media blitz Wednesday, House Speaker Tim Jones detailed his plan to strip out the portions [from HB 253] that Nixon found objectionable and push the legislation as the first bill of the coming session.

Those portions to be stripped out – that’ll be the hidden sales taxes and “unintended consequences” segments. Savage cuts to already low corporate taxes will remain, despite the potential damage to the state’s dismal revenue stream. Missouri’s GOPers are, after all, desperately eager to follow the “trend” set by Republican statehouses in Oklahoma, Kansas and a few other states that are attempting to spur economic growth by bankrupting their states.

It was clever of Governor Nixon to make the question of education funding the lynch-pin of his struggle to sustain the veto of HB253. Educational funding in Missouri is already dismal – per student funding in the state of Missouri is 3.1% lower than it was in 2008. But hey, guess what? Take a look at Oklahoma, one of the states that recently decimated its system of taxation – and which our Missouri GOPers cite as an example of what we have to do to be competitive. Oklahoma is now spending 22.8% less per student than it was in 2008 and is one of only 15 states that cut its per student spending this year. As for Kansas, one result of its tax cutting orgy is per student spending that is 16.5% less than in 2008 – and, according to a state district court,  failing to provide students a ‘suitable’ education.” The Governor was simply trying to warn concerned Missourians that we could expect the same deterioration in our school system if we followed the tax-cutting trend that has afflicted these states.

What the Governor didn’t tell us and what many don’t realize, though, is that many of those folks behind the tax-cutting frenzy actually want to starve public education. They probably look at those Oklahoma and Kansas education spending figures and chortle with glee.

One of the staunchest supporters of the effort to revive HB253 – to the tune of over $2 million – was St. Louis billionaire Rex Sinquefield. A year ago he floated ballot initiatives to cut income taxes and shift the burden of Missouri taxes onto the backs of the poor and middle class via expanded sales tax increases – while seriously decreasing state revenue. According to Steve Kraske, House Speaker Tim Jones wouldn’t have even brought up the sure-to-fail HB253 for an override vote if not for Sinquefield:

If you believe the hallway yak in the Missouri Capitol, Jones sought a vote on the tax bill only because the Missouri GOP’s leading benefactor, Rex Sinquefield, demanded it. Jones wanted to keep the rich guy happy more than he did his own colleagues, even though the speaker knew the vote was a loser.

Sinquefield is a never say die type of guy, and this issue is one of his two two major political obsessions The other is privatizing eduction. He has spent money lavishly attempting to drive a wedge between Missourians and their public schools, seizing on the disenchantment many feel as they are bombarded with news of failing schools in districts coping with poverty and social malaise. Nevertheless:

Education groups have balked at many of his educational initiatives, especially efforts to use state tax credits for private schools. He also sparked a backlash last year when he referenced a column in a central Missouri newspaper that seemed to suggest that the Ku Klux Klan created public education to harm black children.

You want to know why we’ll have to deal with the zombie tax-cut bill again next year and why the fight to adequately fund our public schools is a losing cause? Look no further than Rex Sinquefield and the folks who think like he does, along with the politicians who, as Steve Kraske suggests, are wholly owned subsidiaries of Sinquefield Inc.

Folks like Sinquefield are the reason that the education-for-the-future gambit that our Governor is playing to ward off tax butchery is so precarious. He’s threatening an outcome that they’ve been trying to achieve for years – the elimination of public schools, leaving education to a free market that doesn’t give a damn about the children of those on the bottom of the social heap.

Today, as my fellow-blogger Michael Bersin has already informed us, the Missouri House failed to override Governor Nixon’s veto of the infamous corporate tax cut bill which failed on a 94-67 vote, short of the two thirds majority needed to override. That means it’s over and done with, gone away, dead – for now.

It is true that HB253 was a poorly written bill, rife with unintended consequences. It was also, however,  a conceptually bad idea from the point of view of economic policy, even had the folks who put it together had sufficient brain power to do it in a cleaner fashion. And it’s important to remember that fact because indications are that it’ll be back soon, and next time the petty stupidities that plagued the bill and that persuaded some of the more thoughtful Republicans to uphold the veto, may be gone and we’ll have to try once more to fend off the bad policy it embodies – trickle down economics via monster tax cuts for corporations, big cuts for wealthy individuals and symbolic tax cuts for everyone else, the state’s solvency be dammed.

Earlier, when confronted with the obvious fact that the override effort might fail, Speaker Tim Jones had been emphatic that he wasn’t going to let this failure derail his goal, declaring that in such a case “income tax cuts will be a big priority next year.” Today, after losing the override vote, Jones confirmed that he has no intention of letting sleeping dogs lie when it comes to radical tax “reform”:

In a statement released after the vote, House Speaker Tim Jones, R-Eureka, said: “This is only a temporary setback for the majority of House members who believe substantive tax relief is the best way to grow our economy and to help the hard-working Missourians who deserve to keep more of their hard-earned dollars. … We will not be swayed from our efforts to provide Missourians with the tax relief they deserve and we will make a tax cut our top legislative priority when we return for the 2014 legislative session in January.”

As for the bill’s chief sponsor, Rex Sinquefield,  the $2.4 million dollars the billionaire spent promoting HB253 can easily be written off as a down payment; a first gambit in a game in which he plans to wear down the resistance with a combination of big spending and persistence. Nor, I suspect, will the Missouri Chamber of Commerce let Speaker Jones down when he revives his signature initiative, even though many commonsensical, local Chambers of  Congress broke with the big daddy organization and urged that the veto be sustained.

What can we learn from these facts? That these clowns just won’t give up. And they’ve got lots of money behind them. And if we really support progressive government, we can’t give up and sit on our – or the Governor’s – HB 253 laurels. We have to be ready for 2014 and this badly thought out tax “reform” needs to be one of the issues we trot out to make our case against the corporate-owned marauders currently holding the statehouse.