Resist distraction by design, Return home to Kansas

Eugene Robinson does a good job of identifying the lessons to be learned from Kansas about the predictably false promises regularly made about how tax cuts will spur job growth.

‘The states are supposed to be laboratories for testing government policy. For five years, Kansas’ Republican governor, Sam Brownback, conducted the nation’s most radical exercise in trickle-down economics — a “real live experiment,” he called it. He and the GOP-controlled Legislature slashed the state’s already-low tax rates, eliminated state income tax for most owner-operated businesses and sharply reduced vital government services. These measures were supposed to deliver “a shot of adrenaline into the heart of the Kansas economy,” Brownback said.

It ended up being a shot of poison. Growth rates lagged behind those in neighboring states and the nation as a whole. Deficits mounted to unsustainable levels. Services withered. Brownback had set in motion a vicious cycle, not a virtuous one.

Last week, finally, the Legislature — still controlled by Republicans — overrode Brownback’s veto of legislation restoring taxation to sane levels. The nightmare experiment is coming to an end….

…Eliminating business income taxes for owner-operated companies was supposed to induce entrepreneurs to move to Kansas from other states. It didn’t. It turned out that business owners take more than taxes into account when they decide where to locate. They want good health care and first-rate schools for themselves and their employees. They want modern, well-maintained infrastructure. In short, they want a healthy, functioning public sector.’

But it strikes me as unlikely that Republicans in Congress will learn from the lessons in Kansas and more likely they will follow the president’s lead and distract, confuse, and intimidate to advance an agenda designed to benefit only the uber-wealthy. This strategy can be reasonably understood as what Naomi Klein calls the shock doctrine.

Naomi Klein’s analysis of ‘the shock doctrine,’ is very helpful, because we need to not only understand Trump on the level of this or that policy idea, but also on the deeper level of strategy and political communication in particular.

And she provides a 5 step action-oriented process for resisting elite efforts to benefit as a class from chaos, confusion and distraction… and bring us back to the best available data so we can learn the hard lessons made clear from experiments like we now see in Kansas.