Justin Fox, Columnist

Running the Numbers on the Kansas Experiment

The tax cuts were a disaster, sure -- but only for Sam Brownback's political aspirations.

June 27, 2017 at 12:46 PM UTC

Corrected

June 30, 2017 at 6:08 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

Ineffective isn't the same as failure.
Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

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Ah, the Kansas experiment. It doesn't seem to be going so well! Republican Governor Sam Brownback, who pushed through big tax cuts in 2012 at the urging of supply-side guru Arthur Laffer, now has an approval rating of 27 percent -- besting only New Jersey's Chris Christie. The Republican-majority Legislature voted earlier this month to override Brownback's veto of a $1.2 billion tax hike meant to bring the state's red-ink-ridden budget back to somewhere near balance.

In political terms, then, the experiment was clearly a failure. But was it really an economic failure -- and if so, how big a failure? And why didn't it work?