Kansas’ Cultural Revolution
In 1966 Mao Zedong initiated the Cultural Revolution in China. It was an ideologically-based movement/experiment to impose Maoist orthodoxy throughout China. The movement’s major goals were to do away with capitalism, along with certain traditional and cultural practices, and replace them with that orthodoxy.
The result of this program was a fiasco. This movement was characterized by the eviscerating of universities and intelligentsia, forcibly displacing millions of youth and faculty to rural regions. It was characterized also by arbitrary imprisonment, torture, public humiliation, and property seizure. Untold numbers of cultural and religious artifacts were destroyed.
These abuses continued until after the death of Mao in 1976 and a reform movement led by Deng Xiaoping arrested the so-called “Gang of Four.” China’s Cultural Revolution has been seen – even in Communist China today – as an unmitigated failure.
Fast-forward forty years and halfway around the world, and we see similar behavior in Kansas. Sam Brownback and his lapdog legislature are in the process of destroying education, social services, scientific research, infrastructure maintenance, and the ability of low wage-earners to improve their lot.
They are trying to eliminate the semi-progressive income tax from which the state gets half its revenue in favor of continuing and expanding the very regressive sales tax. Brownback tries to convince people that the sales tax is needed to continue funding higher education, but the truth is that the need to do so is created by his reduction of income tax. Another result of no- or low-income tax in a state is higher property taxes. For example, a home in no-income-tax Texas has approximately twice the property tax of a home of the same value in Massachusetts or California where graduated income taxes exist. It should be noted that no-income-tax states like Texas, Wyoming, Alaska, Florida or New Hampshire are able to supplement their revenues from oil or coal or tourism, which Kansas cannot do.
This is a self-inflicted wound that benefits only those with significant wealth to start with. The conservative Tax Policy Center has rated this program as the worst in the nation.
Other Brownback initiatives include reduction of university faculties (intentionally or as a result of tax cuts,) evisceration of social services such as mental health and children’s food programs (exacerbated by his not yet accepting federal Medicaid money), making abortion totally unavailable, promoting the teaching of the Judeo-Christian version of creationism, expanding the presence of guns in society, and disdain for the suffering of the less well-off.
And they’ve done all this in the name of ideology and extremist orthodoxy. The crazies have taken over our state government. So far, we haven’t suffered as badly as Mao’s China, but we are well on the way.
Douglas B. McGaw
dbmcgaw@sbcglobal.net