Must-Read: Yael T. Abouhalkah: Paging Gov. Sam Brownback’s Sycophants

Must-Read: I must say: this amazes me. The old argument was that large Kansas-Missouri differences in AFDC payments back before 1995 did not lead single mothers to move across State Line Road into Kansas, so why should we expect even sharp state tax differentials to pull people across? The answer to that is: It was very, very clear that African-Americans in Kansas City were suppose to stay east of Troost. And non-African American AFDC recipients were much more geographically dispersed, hence it was not a short move.

Thus I thought business would be different.

I really did think that Brownback’s tax cuts would pull enough income across State Line Road to allow him to declare him non-defeat, and indeed to avoid utter defeat, when the rubber of his ideology met the road of reality and he had to make a Kansas state budget. Yet it is not so:

Yael T. Abouhalkah: Paging Gov. Sam Brownback’s Sycophants: “Kansas tax cuts still aren’t killing Missouri jobs in KC area…

…Jobs continue to grow more quickly on the Missouri side of the state line than on the Kansas side of the Kansas City metropolitan area. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the Missouri portion of the region gained 2 percent in employment from September 2014 to September 2015. Meanwhile, the Kansas portion gained .9 percent…. This new report continues a recent trend in year-over-year superiority for the Missouri side…. This is not supposed to be happening, at least according to Brownback and his followers. He has stated that the income tax cuts he put in place in 2013 would generate more jobs especially in the Kansas City area, because it’s supposedly so easy just to hop the state line to reap tax benefits. Yet, month after month, that’s not happening…

October 29, 2015

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Brad DeLong
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