Outside the Beltway

Comments

1. Ron Beasley says:
   Sunday, 5 October 2014 at 12:16

   Message to politicians – don’t forget what State you represent. Both of my Senators here in Oregon have houses in middle class SE Portland neighborhoods. Rick Santorum learned this lesson when he didn’t even pay someone to mow the lawn not to mention his house had no furniture in it. Roberts’ case was even worse – his Kansas address was a friend,s house where he apparently had a couch he could sleep on. I would guess that Roberts is spending as much time looking for a job in DC as he is campaigning.
2. EddieInCA says:
   Sunday, 5 October 2014 at 12:23

   If you want to see what unfettered GOP control looks like, just look at Kansas. I keep asking for any of our GOP supporters (Pinky, John425, bill, Jenos, edmondo, Gravillo, Bithead, any of them) to explain how the disaster that is Kansas has anything to do other than a complete failure of GOP policies enacted fully in a red state.

   Crickets.
   Silence.

   Why? Because there is nothing to defend. It’s the policies that suck, not the politicians.

   The simple fact is that there is nothing in the Kansas situation to blame other than the policies themselves. Personal Income Taxes were cut. Regulations were gutted. Abortion restrictions enacted and enforced. Business Taxes slashed. Environmental standards relaxed. Obamacare denied.

   Result? A red state that will soon be purple just due to the sheer horrifying results of the GOP policies enacted. When you have more than 100 GOP previously-elected officials signing a letter for the guy running AGAINST the GOP incumbent Governor, there might be a problem with the policies he enacted, with the help of a GOP State House and State Senate.

   No blame for the Dems in Kansas, that’s for damn sure.

   On the flip side, look at what happened to Californa when we finally got rid of the roadblocks the GOP was putting in the way of progress: A balanced budget, and a healthy state. Finally. Took getting rid of the GOP obstruction to get California back on it’s feet.
3. stonetools says:
   Sunday, 5 October 2014 at 15:42

   @EddieInCA:

   Conservative commenters don’t want to discuss situations where their cockeyed theories are debunked, so its not surprising that conservatives are avoiding the topic like vampires avoid sunlight. Note that the OP doesn’t even hazard a guess as to why Orman is surging. Dr. K is on it:

   Charlatans, Cranks and Kansas, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: Two years ago Kansas embarked on a remarkable fiscal experiment: It sharply slashed income taxes without any clear idea of what would replace the lost revenue. Sam Brownback, the governor, proposed the legislation — in percentage terms, the largest tax cut in one year any state has ever enacted — in close consultation with the economist Arthur Laffer. And Mr. Brownback predicted that the cuts would jump-start an economic boom…

   But Kansas isn’t booming — in fact, its economy is lagging both neighboring states and America as a whole. Meanwhile, the state’s budget has plunged deep into deficit, provoking a Moody’s downgrade of its debt.

   There’s an important lesson here — but it’s not what you think. Yes, the Kansas debacle shows that tax cuts don’t have magical powers, but we already knew that. The real lesson from Kansas is the enduring power of bad ideas,

   as

   long as those ideas serve the interests of the right people. …

   For the Brownback tax cuts didn’t emerge out of thin air. They closely followed a blueprint laid out by the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, which has also supported a series of economic studies purporting to show that tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy will promote rapid economic growth. The studies are embarrassingly bad, and the council’s Board of Scholars — which includes both Mr. Laffer and Stephen Moore of the Heritage Foundation — doesn’t exactly shout credibility. …

   RTWT, as they say.

   Mean while in California, the land of fruits, nuts, and lefties, things are groovy:

   California has long suffered from political paralysis, with budget rules that allowed an increasingly extreme Republican minority to hamstring a Democratic majority; when the state’s housing bubble burst, it plunged into fiscal crisis. In 2012, however, Democratic dominance finally became strong enough to overcome the paralysis, and Gov. Jerry Brown was able to push through a modestly liberal agenda of higher taxes, spending increases and a rise in the minimum wage. California also moved enthusiastically to implement Obamacare.

   I guess we’re not in Kansas anymore. (Sorry, I couldn’t help myself.)

   Needless to say, conservatives predicted doom. A representative reaction: Daniel J. Mitchell of the Cato Institute declared that by voting for Proposition 30, which authorized those tax increases, “the looters and moochers of the Golden State” (yes, they really do think they’re living in an Ayn Rand novel) were committing “economic suicide.” Meanwhile, Avik Roy of the Manhattan Institute and Forbes claimed that California residents were about to face a “rate shock” that would more than double health insurance premiums.

   What has actually happened? There is, I’m sorry to say, no sign of the promised catastrophe.

   If tax increases are causing a major flight of jobs from California, you can’t see it in the job numbers. Employment is up 3.6 percent in the past 18 months, compared with a national average of 2.8 percent; at this point, California’s share of national employment, which was hit hard by the bursting of the state’s enormous housing bubble, is back to pre-recession levels.

   On health care, some people — basically healthy young men who were getting inexpensive insurance on the individual market and were too affluent to receive subsidies — did face premium increases, which we always knew would happen. Over all, however, the costs of health reform came in below expectations, while enrollment came in well above — more than triple initial predictions in the San Francisco area. A recent survey by the Commonwealth Fund suggests that California has already cut the percentage of its residents without health insurance in half. What’s more, all indications are that further progress is in the pipeline, with more insurance companies entering the marketplace for next year.

   And, yes, the budget is back in surplus.
   

   Maybe California and Kansas will be a harbinger of what will happen nationally. A liiberal can dream…
4. C. Clavin says:
   Sunday, 5 October 2014 at 20:20

   Republicans do not want to talk about Kansas…it’s the full on Republican agenda…and a full on failure. What that are trying to sell…DOES NOT WORK. Kansas, Minnesota, NJ…it doesn’t work on the state level and it doesn’t work at the National Level. No one can point to anytime it has worked. It’s a radical agenda…with no historical record to support it.