| dc.description.abstract | In 2012, Kansas Republicans, led by Governor Sam Brownback, passed a radical supply-side tax cutting package that cut income tax rates, eliminated the top income tax bracket, eliminated various deductions and credits, and (most controversially) fully eliminated state income tax on many business owners. However, five years later, a supermajority of Republicans and Democrats voted over Brownback’s veto to repeal the tax cuts. This research asks: What would lead tax cutting Republicans to embrace a tax increase? To answer this question, this dissertation draws on over two years of ethnographic material, including 110 in-depth interviews, ethnographic observations, and newspaper and legislative document analysis. This project argues the tax cuts in Kansas could not be sustained because there are social limits to supply-side tax reforms. In this project, I examine the structural and institutional conditions under which neoliberal tax reforms provokes a countermovement for social protection. I argue that this occurs in the absence of financialization, which has allowed Republicans nationally to continue to pursue massive tax cuts while paying very little political cost. However, in Kansas, the Republican Party paid a large political price for their devotion to the tax policy. As a consequence of this, economic policies were repoliticized and brought into the realm of public debate, thus fostering a renewed sense of ‘fiscal citizenship’ across the state. This dissertation explores this process of repoliticization and countermovement in three critical institutional areas impacted by the tax cuts: public education, small businesses, and economic forecasting. | |
