Former U.S. Senator Sam Brownback ran for governor of Kansas in 2010 on a radical platform of eliminating the state income tax, reducing funding for public schools, creating judicial elections, and dismantling welfare. Brownback was successful in sharply reducing income tax rates and reducing public education funding. He drove Kansas into such a deep financial hole and angered so many people with his public education cuts, that at an early point in his campaign for re-election in 2014, he trailed his moderate Democratic opponent by ten percentage points in the polls. The dispatch of major Republican surrogates to Kansas and a large infusion of campaign money saved Brownback's bacon but has provided a lot less bacon for Kansas residents.
Early this year there was a report that Kansas was still in a deep financial hole and Kansas faced further reductions in the state income tax based on the original legislation. The share of children who qualify for subsidized school lunches has grown to more than fifty percent for the first time in Kansas's history. [1]
RaDonna Kuekelhan lives in Montgomery County, Kansas, where one in five people live in poverty; also, twenty-two percent of people in Montgomery County are uninsured. RaDonna is in a Catch-22 situation, because as a childless adult she can't quality for state assistance no matter how little she earns. In Kansas, there are an estimated 78,000 people like RaDonna who are caught in a coverage gap: they earn too much to qualify for Medicaid -- fully privatized in Kansas -- under the old rules, but not enough to qualify for private-insurance tax credits. [2]
It is a Brownback bragging point that he has cut the number of people receiving state assistance by more than half. He doesn't, of course, dwell on on how much the quality of life has been reduced for those who have lost state assistance.
ADDENDUMS:
*More on Ben Carson's Views on Firearms - I have previously blogged on how Ben Carson has claimed that if he was in a group of people confronted by a gunman, he would urge everyone to join him in a charge toward the gunman. More recently, Carson has revealed that he once had a man stick a gun against his neck in a convenience store. Carson said he told the gunman that: "I think you want to talk to the man behind the counter." When questioned about this seemingly non-heroic reaction by Wolf Blitzer on his "Situation Room" program, Carson tried to distinguish between the two situations by saying that the convenience store encounter didn't involve a mass shooting, although he couldn't be sure that the man with the gun might be intent on shooting everyone in the store.
Ben Carson has a preventive remedy for mass school shootings: he would arm school teachers -- for some reason he has focused on kindergarten teachers. I believe it was on "The View" that he was asked if all teachers would be given a firearm. He answered that only teachers trained to properly use a firearm would be armed and the firearm would not be left on the desk. Given that these mass shootings in schools have become very frequent and they can occur in any classroom in K-12 schools or in any college or university, it would seem that every teacher and maybe every administrator would need to be armed. Who would foot the bill for this enormous expenditure?
In order to prevent an inquisitive student from finding the firearm and doing harm with it, the weapon would need to be locked in a desk drawer or behind a closet door. While the teacher was fumbling for the key when a gunman burst into the classroom, she/he would likely be the first person shot. The possibility that a teacher might engage in a mass shooting can't be entirely ruled out.
*Jews on Abortion - Ninety-three percent of American Jews believe that abortion should be legal in all or most circumstances, including ninety-five percent of Jewish Democrats and seventy-seven percent of Jewish Republicans. The Gordon Jewish Community Center in Nashville, Tennessee prevented Planned Parenthood of Middle and East Tennessee from holding a fundraiser there. The Center was apparently pressured by Catholic members from nearby major Catholic institutions.
Footnotes
[1] Kai Wright, "Life and Death in Red America," The Nation, June 22/29, 2015. [2] Ibid.
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