Wednesday, October 01, 2014

Tectonic Update: North Carolina & Kansas, Together at Last

The exceedingly bright Thomas Mills writes today about how Kansas and North Carolina became "laboratories" for far-right, ALEC-sponsored experiments in dismantling the social compact, moving as much of government as possible to private contractors, including public education, while unleashing the polluters and the pillagers and shifting more of the tax burden to the middle class while coddling the rich.

Just a sample:
...Both states are seeing a public backlash.
Just like North Carolina, Gov. Sam Brownback and the Republican legislature slashed taxes on the wealthiest while raising them on the poor, promising that the changes would spur economic growth. It didn’t happen in either state. Kansas has seen a hole in its budget so large that its bond rating was downgraded. North Carolina already has a 10% drop in revenue and we are still a couple of years behind Kansas.
In Kansas, Republican Brownback won by double digits in 2010. Today, he’s trailing his Democratic opponent, Rep. Paul Davis. More than 100 Republican elected and former elected officials endorsed Davis.
If Pat McCrory were running this year, he would likely face similar numbers. But he’s not. Instead, all of our legislature is up for re-election. And the numbers aren’t far off of Kansas. In districts that should be safe for Republicans, they are trailing. Thom Tillis is losing his race to Kay Hagan right now largely because ofhis record as speaker of the house....

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