Kevin Drum @ MotherJones has a schadenfreude article on the state of Kansas these days:
Ouch. From 2005 to 2011, Kansas was growing faster than the US economy. This continued for about a year after Brownback took office, at which point economic growth declined and then flatlined. But hey—maybe things are just tough in the Midwest? Not really, it turns out. Here’s how Kansas compares to her neighboring states since 2011:
I think this is the right chart, I had to recover it after the link disappeared. HAW
The chart comes from EconBrowser, run by Professors Hamilton (UCSD) and Chin (UW-Madison). And – fully acknowledging that a single economic factor isn’t going to have that much of an impact – I can’t help but notice the ascendancy of Colorado in terms of economic growth and note that Colorado is one of the few states that have legalized marijuana. This occurred in late 2012, and the first stores opened the first day of 2014. The chart indicates Colorado was already well ahead of Kansas, and the story just gets worse as time flows by.
The Colorado story could easily be one of personal freedom / responsibility, but that’s a bit of a fairy tale without numbers. I’d like to see a time-series for each state indicating how the tax changes each state has implemented (or not) has impacted the the personal income quintiles of the citizenry. That is, in the typical division of the citizens into 5 chunks by income, how much tax burden by percentage does that quintile carry? Taking that as an inverse proxy for personal freedom might indicate that the Kansas tax cuts have, in reality, increased the relative burden of most folks, while benefiting just a few. And that might explain, in some small part, the Kansas disaster.
