Politicians on both sides of the aisle have long maintained that the 50 states represents the laboratories of democracy. Republicans in particular have praised the idea of giving more flexibility to states, arguing that what’s suitable for California may not be the best solution for Kansas—though exactly how education and health care are supposed to be affected by lines on a map is never made quite clear. With Republicans dominating not just the government in Washington, D. C., but state governments in many areas of the nation, they’ve been given a perfect chance to draft the perfect conservative experiment—low taxes, limited government, socially suffocating.
Only the results from all those Republican experiments … isn’t what they promised.
Something strange has been happening to taxes in Republican-dominated states: They are going up. …
Republicans, with control of Congress and the White House and a base that is growing impatient for tax reform, are trying to solve a difficult math problem: paying for critical programs like infrastructure, health care and education while honoring their promise to deliver lower taxes without exploding the deficit.
In state after state, Republican devotion to tax cuts as a solution to everything from boosting the economy to failing colleges has been put to the test. And it’s failed.
What states have discovered is what economists said all along—the Laffer Curve is simply laughable:
And now some Republicans say that what has played out in these states should serve as a cautionary tale in Washington, where their party’s leaders are confronting a set of circumstances that looks strikingly similar.
