Republicans and unions raise rates higher than in Massachusetts.
The press accounts gleefully talk of how “moderate Republicans” joined with Democrats to raise taxes to address exploding state deficits. But substitute “Republicans backed by teachers unions” for moderate Republicans, and the real picture comes into focus.At bottom the Kansas tax vote was as much about unions getting even with the Governor over his education reforms, which included making it easier to fire bad teachers... the 2012 tax cuts that reduced the top rate on personal income taxes to 4.9% from 6.45% and eliminated income tax for small businesses filing as individuals... Mr. Brownback was unlucky in his timing, given the hits to the agricultural and energy industries that count for much of the state economy... Mr. Brownback’s reform mistake was that in eliminating taxes on “pass-through” small businesses, the Governor created a loophole that allowed law firms, accounting agencies, consultants and many others to declare wage income to be business profit and pay little or nothing. This caused lower tax revenues than Mr. Brownback predicted.. public unions support the state GOP’s liberal wing... The one relevant Kansas lesson is that Republicans in Washington need to be careful how they write any tax reform for “pass-through” businesses. One way to do that is to avoid letting pass-through tax rates get too much lower than rates on wage and salary income
Conservatives near revolt on Senate health care negotiations
Republicans are increasingly pessimistic that key conservative senators will vote for the eventual bill.
Conservative senators and allied outside groups are on the verge of rebellion against the Senate’s Obamacare repeal effort
.. the Senate bill continues to tilt toward more moderate members of the GOP on keeping some of Obamacare’s regulatory structure and providing a more generous wind-down of the law’s Medicaid expansion. The movement has made Republicans increasingly pessimistic that two critical conservative senators, Mike Lee of Utah and Rand Paul of Kentucky, will be able to vote for the GOP’s ultimate agreement
.. it keeps “90 percent” of Obamacare, said he opposes the creation of high-risk pools favored by many Republicans, and urged Republicans to abandon attempts to save the individual marketplace with an infusion of cash.
.. “We promised the voters that we’d repeal Obamacare,” Paul said. “Instead, we want to repeal sort of a tiny bit of it and replace it with something that looks a lot like Obamacare.”
.. The outline leadership has presented isn’t Obamacare repeal, in fact it isn’t even reform. It’s a tax cut and a corporate bailout masquerading as health legislation,” said a conservative Senate aide.
.. The original plan was to pass a 2015 bill, vetoed by President Barack Obama, that would essentially have scrapped much of the law with no replacement.
.. they know an ideological reckoning is upon the party
Brownback Tax Cuts Set Off a Revolt by Kansas Republicans
Gov. Sam Brownback’s leadership of Kansas came to be synonymous with a single, unyielding philosophy: Cut taxes, cut the size of government, and the state will thrive.
But this week, Mr. Brownback’s deeply conservative state turned on him and his austere approach. Fed up with gaping budget shortfalls, inadequate education funding and insufficient revenue, the Republican-controlled Legislature capped months of turmoil by overriding the governor’s veto of a bill that would undo some of his tax cuts and raise $1.2 billion over two years.
.. “Email after email after email I get from constituents, say, ‘Please, let’s stop this experiment,’” she said.
.. First elected governor of Kansas seven years ago by a wide margin, Mr. Brownback wasted no time steering the Republican Party on a hard-right turn. In his first term, he helped push out moderate Republicans from the Legislature. Under his leadership, Kansas loosened restrictions on guns, made it harder for women to get abortions and passed some of the strictest voting laws in the country.
Most famously, he instituted the largest income tax cuts in Kansas history, a move that he promised would act “like a shot of adrenaline in the heart of the Kansas economy.”
.. In 2014, Kansans paid $700 million less in state taxes than the previous fiscal year
.. And in March, the Kansas Supreme Court found that the state’s spending on public education was unconstitutionally low
.. Democrats, like Senator Tom Holland, of Baldwin City, cheered the end of “Sam’s march to zero.”
.. [Kris Kobach] .. “Kansas does not have a taxation problem; it has a spending problem,”
Trump Pushing Big White House Changes as Russia Crisis Grows
Meetings are set for next week as the president returns from his overseas trip
the president slept only two hours in Saudi Arabia the night before his widely anticipated speech on Islam that he spent little time rehearsing.
.. One major change under consideration would see the president’s social media posts vetted by a team of lawyers, who would decide if any needed to be adjusted or curtailed. The idea, said one of Mr. Trump’s advisers, is to create a system so that tweets “don’t go from the president’s mind out to the universe.”
Some of Mr. Trump’s tweets—from hinting that he may have taped conversations with Mr. Comey to suggesting without any evidence that former President Barack Obama wire-tapped Trump Tower—have opened him to criticism and at times confounded his communications team.
Trump aides have long attempted to rein in his tweeting, and some saw any type of legal vetting as difficult to implement. “I would be shocked if he would agree to that,” said Barry Bennett, a former Trump campaign aide.
.. Some senior administration officials said they are considering hiring their own private attorneys... the president may also bring back a trio of former campaign officials: Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie, to handle communications and political duties related to the investigation, and David Urban, for a senior White House job.
- .. Mr. Bossie, the deputy campaign manager, is a long-time political operative who worked for the House oversight committee in the 1990s.
- Mr. Urban worked as a top Republican Senate aide in the late 1990s during the Bill Clinton impeachment proceedings.
.. “The most important thing is Trump listens to them,” one senior administration official said. “And it will free up the rest of the White House to focus on health care, taxes and the things we should be worrying about.”
.. Mr. Lewandowski’s return may prove awkward internally. He was accused of assaulting a reporter at a campaign event—charges were eventually dropped—and Trump family members believed he was peddling negative stories about Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, campaign officials said at the time. He was pushed out at the behest of Mr. Trump’s children.
.. One White House official said that Mr. Spicer, parodied by comedian Melissa McCarthy on “Saturday Night Live,” has taken on an unwanted celebrity status that threatens to undercut his effectiveness as a spokesman. “I wouldn’t wish being parodied on Saturday Night Live on anybody,” the official said.
.. Mr. Bannon’s critics say they suspect him of leaking to the press and regard him as too much of a firebrand to massage the president’s agenda through Washington’s traditional processes. Mr. Kushner’s detractors in the West Wing refer to him as the “young princeling.”
.. questioned the judgment of communications officials, citing as an example the rollout of a tax-plan outline in April that featured Goldman Sachs alumni Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, and Gary Cohn
.. “The left is automatically going to say the tax plan is tailored to the rich and to Wall Street. And we just gave them an image of the rich and of Wall Street,” one Trump former campaign official said.