Tip the schools instead.
That’s the message waitress Chloe Hough gave Republican Kansas Governor Sam Brownback this weekend when he stopped in for a bite to eat at Boss Hawg’s Barbeque in Topeka.
Hough was actually on her last shift as a waitress there, so when the governor asked for his check, she saw an opportunity she couldn't pass up. After crossing out the tip line on the bill, she wrote a note next to it that said, “Tip the schools.”
Hough then posted a picture of the edited bill on Facebook, where it’s since gone viral. Don’t get the wrong idea, though. This wasn't some sort of publicity stunt. For Chloe Hough, this was personal.
Like millions of other Jayhawk State residents, she and her family have felt the sting of Governor Sam Brownback’s failed experiment in Reaganomics.
Chloe Hough is right. Education is the foundation for a better country and a more forward-thinking society. But that, of course, is not how Governor Brownback and the rest of the Republican Party see it.
To them, education funding is just another thing to cut to make way for massive tax cuts, tax cuts that in Kansas have been an absolute and unmitigated disaster.
After he was elected governor in 2011,
Sam Brownback promised to make his state “a real live experiment” in right-wing Reaganist economic theories. So he went ahead and slashed the top income tax rate for the rich, opened a loophole that allowed businesses to pay taxes as individuals, and eliminated a bunch of other smaller taxes.
The governor said that these tax cuts for rich people would boost Kansas’ economy and jump start job growth, but nothing has really panned out the way he said it would.
Since 2012 when Brownback’s tax cuts began,
Kansas has consistently lagged behind the national average in job growth, and while it did do better on that count in 2014, it didn't do nearly as well as neighboring states like Missouri, which didn't cut taxes for the rich.
Thanks to Brownback’s tax cuts,
the Jayhawk state now faces a budget shortfall of $422 million.And who’s had to pay the price for the fiscal mess created by Brownback and the ideologues in the Republican Party?
Well, among other things, the school system.
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