After the Senate Budget Committee cleared a massive Republican tax bill Tuesday along party lines, with two wavering Republicans voting in favor, the prospect brightened for the Senate approving the legislation on Thursday or Friday. President Trump and GOP leaders spent the day assuring Republicans worried about adding up to $1.5 trillion to the deficit or seeking larger tax cuts for pass-through businesses that their concerns will be addressed, and those senators appeared mollified. But in an editorial Tuesday night, The Kansas City Star made a last-ditch, experience-based plea to Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.): "Why would you take this failed experiment nationwide?"
Moran "is not just another Republican who has to decide which way to jump on the tax bill," the Star editorial board wrote. "He has already seen, first-hand, during a very painful five years, what will happen if it passes." For those not up to speed, the Star explains:
Every Kansan knows what happened after Gov. Sam Brownback's 2012 cuts did away with the state income tax for some 330,000 business owners. The governor kept insisting — and in fact, still does — that robust growth and woohoo, jobs galore would result. When that didn't happen, elected officials kept having to dip into funds set aside for highways and schools just to balance the budget. Finally, this year, lawmakers overrode a Brownback veto and at last repealed the LLC tax break and raised income tax rates. [The Kansas City Star]
"Senator, we understand that you want to get something accomplished," the Star editors write. "But you don't have the luxury of the ignorance that the president could plausibly claim when just days after his election he went around promising applauding, whistling patrons in one of New York's best restaurants, 'We'll get your taxes down, don't worry about it.'" You can read the entire editorial at The Kansas City Star.
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
-
August 23 editorial cartoonsCartoons Saturday's political cartoons include deficit dimness, steamroller-in-chief, and more
-
5 museum-grade cartoons about Trump's Smithsonian purgeCartoons Artists take on institutional rebranding, exhibit interpretation, and more
-
Settling the West Bank: a death knell for a Palestine state?In the Spotlight The reality on the ground is that the annexation of the West Bank is all but a done deal
-
New York court tosses Trump's $500M fraud fineSpeed Read A divided appeals court threw out a hefty penalty against President Trump for fraudulently inflating his wealth
-
Trump said to seek government stake in IntelSpeed Read The president and Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan reportedly discussed the proposal at a recent meeting
-
US to take 15% cut of AI chip sales to ChinaSpeed Read Nvidia and AMD will pay the Trump administration 15% of their revenue from selling artificial intelligence chips to China
-
NFL gets ESPN stake in deal with DisneySpeed Read The deal gives the NFL a 10% stake in Disney's ESPN sports empire and gives ESPN ownership of NFL Network
-
Samsung to make Tesla chips in $16.5B dealSpeed Read Tesla has signed a deal to get its next-generation chips from Samsung
-
FCC greenlights $8B Paramount-Skydance mergerSpeed Read The Federal Communications Commission will allow Paramount to merge with the Hollywood studio Skydance
-
Tesla reports plummeting profitsSpeed Read The company may soon face more problems with the expiration of federal electric vehicle tax credits
-
Dollar faces historic slump as stocks hit new highSpeed Read While stocks have recovered post-Trump tariffs, the dollar has weakened more than 10% this year
