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Comment by digitalzombie | Hacker News Reader

Reason why this is important is the Cato institute is funded by the Koch brothers and they were the ones that push for those Tax reforms in Kansas.

Their headquarters is in Kansas.

So it's may just be suspect and an alternative source would be better.

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Fair, though if someone's just listing numbers that are easy to check, the content's probably less biased than the emphasis.

Worth checking anyway, because it's any single source.

If you look at property and vehicle taxes, they're a little above average: https://wallethub.com/edu/best-worst-states-to-be-a-taxpayer...

From the same site, income taxes are a little below average but not zero.

Sales taxes are decidedly higher than average (in part due to local taxes): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_taxes_in_the_United_Stat...

I'd prefer a more progressive mix that deemphasizes sales taxes in favor of income taxes.

But most stories describe this as some kind of suicide pact. That seems somewhat extreme.

Yes, there was a budget crunch after this, but the same budget crunch was felt in similar states without tax policy changes, most likely driven by lingering impacts of the great recession and changes in federal tax policy.

Al Franken had a great line about media bias in Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. He said everyone thinks the media is biased towards right or left when it's really just biased towards calamity and sensationalism.

Cato is right-wing, but the rest of the world is trying to sell you papers. Caveat emptor either way.

EDIT: Hmm, tried to provide a balanced reply with more neutral sources with a level tone. Downvote was a good reminder that Politics is the Mindkiller.

I would think that the Cato Institute indicating that the tax reforms had little effect would make the argument more credible. Their bias is to be in favor of tax cuts.

Parse it more closely; they're not arguing that the tax reforms had little effect on the state, they're arguing that they had little effect on the tax burden at the state level. Their only metric for measuring success is whether or not taxes are lower -- which is fine since they're a partisan advocacy group, but real humans live there too and they have to live with all of the impacts that Cato doesn't concern themselves with.

Reason why this is not important is if your only path of attack is through the "who did it" path and you have nothing whatsoever to say about the actual content, maybe you should base your attack on more solid ground. Should be easy: OP gave us facts to verify, not an opinion. If his facts are indeed facts you will need more than merely point to the Koch brothers, regardless of their well-known agenda.

Context is important because the number of true facts we can spout about the economy of Kansas is legion and its highly likely a propaganda shop has cherry picked the ones they deliver.

Sadly, OPs linked claims don't tell us anything about Kansas' performance under these tax cuts which is really what matters since the point of the tax cuts was to supercharge growth. Did that happen? I'm going to say no:

http://econbrowser.com/archives/2016/10/the-kansas-economy-t...

http://econbrowser.com/archives/2016/12/trends-in-kansas-gdp

Predictive value of conservative "freedom" rankings:

http://econbrowser.com/archives/2015/07/the-information-cont...

Commentary on Kansas budget by former Kansas Republican Budget Director (former for both):

http://www.kansasbudget.com/

...the point of the tax cuts was to supercharge growth.

No, the point is that we subjects get to keep more of the resources for which we work.

Any primarily agricultural state would have had trouble "supercharging growth" over that period. Also Kansas sucks, so it's perfectly possible that "tax cuts" were implemented as direct handouts to the Koch brothers, which of course I wouldn't defend. The general idea of tax cuts is fine, though. b^)

The tax cuts were sold with the phrase, "supercharge growth". So yeah, that kinda was a bit of the point.

You're technically correct, I think -- the actual point isn't to super-charge growth.

But without massive spending cuts, you need supercharged growth to offset lost revenue. The premise of Kansas-style tax policy -- which coincides in spirit with Trump's proposed tax policy -- is that you can avoid massive spending cuts by supercharging growth.

Without that premise, these tax policies would be much more difficult to push through. Because they'd have to admit massive deficit spending, or else come pre-packaged with huge cuts to popular services.

So, the end goal isn't necessarily to supercharge growth, but the promise to supercharge growth is a huge aspect of what makes these tax plans politically viable.

> No, the point is that we subjects get to keep more of the resources for which we work... Any primarily agricultural state would have had trouble "supercharging growth" over that period.

You are moving the goalposts after the experiment has failed. Before these tax reforms were passed, their advocates said over and over that the point was to supercharge growth, and that the tax cuts would surely accomplish that.

> the number of true facts

LOL

Anyway - once again you did NOT respond to what OP wrote. What you did has a name: Whataboutism.

Care to say something about what OP actually wrote? Is he right or wrong? Should be easy to prove him wrong since he made very concrete claims.

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