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Comment by Steko | Hacker News Reader

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/

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> 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.

...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.

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