One state has already tried the Trump tax plan; it failed

Monday, May 1, 2017 | 2 a.m.

A Republican leader with majorities in both the House and Senate proposes deep cuts to business and personal income taxes, saying his aggressive version of trickle-down economics will stimulate a lagging economy.

But we’re not talking about Donald Trump, at least not yet.

The Republican leader in this instance is Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback, who was elected in a landslide in 2010 after promising that his tax plan would attract new businesses to the state, diversify an economy that was overly reliant on agriculture and aircraft manufacturing, create wealth among upper- and middle-income Kansans and send the economy soaring.

Seven years later, here’s how things have turned out:

As noted by the Wichita Eagle in November, Kansas ranked No. 50 in the nation in employment growth, manufacturing hours worked, unemployment rate and wage growth in a report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.

The state government is facing a budget gap of nearly $350 million in the current fiscal year. That’s nothing new. Ongoing deficits have resulted in cuts to state government agencies as well as state funding for universities. It got so bad that the state had to raid its highway construction fund, forcing it to put off road repairs.

Funding for public schools has suffered. Performance on standardized tests has declined in the state’s K-12 schools.

Brownback’s approval ratings sank to the lowest of any governor last year — 23 percent. This is in a state so red that only two of its 105 counties voted for Barack Obama during his re-election cruise in 2012. Brownback had to sweat out a re-election bid over a little-known opponent in 2014 and was loudly booed a year later when he was shown at a March Madness tournament game between the University of Kansas and Wichita State University.

So the plan doesn’t seem to be turning out so well.

Which brings us to Trump’s trickle-down plan, which is enough like Brownback’s that it’s raised a concern among those who have been paying attention to what’s happening in Kansas. Kansans have been sounding alarms on it since last year, growing louder when it was reported that one of the co-architects of the Brownback plan had become a top adviser for Trump.

Trump supporters may say the Kansas economy faces unique challenges in recruiting and retaining businesses, and that its lack of economic diversification makes it more vulnerable than the federal government to ups and downs in certain sectors. For the record, Brownback says the plan is working, and the state’s economy is being held back in no small part because of low prices in commodities, oil and gas.

But those who try to explain away the Kansas situation are missing the point. Brownback’s plan was engineered to be a triumph of trickle-down economics. The pieces were all there: a popular governor (he won by a 30 percent margin in 2010), an enthusiastic Legislature, a heavily Republican electorate.

The plan’s architects believed Kansas would become a model for other states, where voters would see the gains and send waves of Republicans into state offices. They envisioned Brownback, a two-term U.S. senator before running for governor, being elevated to a national stage and seeking the presidency.

But it hasn’t happened, and now it may never.

So it’s alarming that Trump, who should be aware of how the Kansas experiment turned out, went down the same path. People in the heartland know that all too well.

“Congress should not follow Trump and his team into the abyss that Kansans find themselves in today, mostly because of the reckless tax reductions Gov. Sam Brownback signed into law in 2012,” wrote Yael Abouhalkah, a highly respected former columnist for the Kansas City Star, in a recent blog post. He added that “Kansas has become the bright red, warning light example of how cutting taxes does not lead to economic growth, no matter how much Republican politicians claim it will.”