ANS -- What's going to happen when Missouri eliminates half of its tax revenue?

This is from Brad Hicks.  He lives in Missouri.  This is about a bad idea that we are trying again. 

--Kim

infamousbrad

What's going to happen when Missouri eliminates half of its tax revenue?

We get poorer.

It's just that simple. Any kind of an even minimally functioning economy depends on taxpayer funded services for things that the private sector can't or won't fund. Once those services are curtailed or go away altogether, so does the private sector economy that depends on them.

• Once the roads go to shit, any job that depends on roads goes away.
• Once the justice system goes to shit, any job that depends on safety goes away.
• Once the schools go to shit, any job that needs even minimally educated workers goes away.
• Once public health goes to shit, any job that depends on people being healthy enough to work goes away.
• Once all semblance of affordable housing goes away, once affordable transportation goes away, any job that needs low-wage workers goes away.

This isn't even vaguely theory or ideology, this is historical fact. No county, no state, no country, has ever gotten wealthy by providing fewer government services, nobody has ever tax-cut their way to prosperity. I went to a John-Birch-Society-funded private high school, I know that the anarcho-capitalist right thinks that anything that deserves to be done can and will be done better by the private sector, but it's been tried over and over again since the term "laissez fair" was coined and they don't have a single success to point to.

But apparently we're going to try it again, and slide down into chaos and poverty again, and why? Because "my ideology says it does work." Because "nobody else has ever tried hard enough for long enough." (Yeah, there's a reason for that.) Because "we have alternative facts." Because "this time will be different."

Because there is no historical force more implacable than a bad idea whose time has come around again. Because we have record-high income inequality and nobody has ever designed a form of government that can keep money from being converted into power. Because for every problem there is a solution that is easy, obvious, and wrong.