October 16, 2018

Will Kansas Elect Another Republican Even After the Last One Nearly Destroyed Their State?

Here’s a nice, busy, colorful chart for you:

Paul Krugman was tweeting about Kansas this morning, and now that Sam Brownback’s tenure as governor is over and we have pretty complete economic indicators for his entire disastrous governorship, I figured it was time to take a final look. I included California as a comparison since it’s a big fat liberal state that should be failing grievously, and then chose four good economic series. Everything starts in 1998 so you can get a good look at what the trends looked like before 2011, and they’re all shown in comparison to the US average. So how did Kansas do?

  • Median household income: It dropped during Brownback’s first few years but then picked up a bit, ending with approximately zero growth.
  • Coincident economic activity: This is an overall gauge of a state’s economy. It rose for the first three years Brownback was governor, but then withered and ended up 5 percent below the average US level.
  • Gross state product: Fell during Brownback’s entire governorship, ending 7 percent below the US average.
  • Total workforce: Ditto, ending 8 percent below the US average.

During this same time, California grew faster than the US average on every economic indicator. I don’t know how that’s possible given all our taxes and regulations and environmental voodoo, but somehow we did.

But this is not the most remarkable part of all this. The most remarkable part is that Kansans are now holding another election and the Republican candidate is Kris Kobach—who is not only odious in his own right, but is also basically a Brownback clone. Right now the polls are neck-and-neck, and there’s a good chance Kobach will win. It just goes to show the power of Republican economic thought in certain parts of the country. Even after Sam Brownback spent eight years nearly destroying their state with his “great experiment,” it’s entirely likely that Kansans will elect a man who plans to do pretty much the same thing. I guess they just don’t like economic growth very much in Kansas.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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