All they want to do is cut taxes and implement policies that will make their businesses more profitable. They can afford health insurance and medical care. They can afford education for their kids. They can afford food, gas, credit, utilities, energy and police and legal protection. They can afford rehab for their opioid addictions. They can afford savings plans and pensions and bonuses and they can negotiate golden parachutes so they can retire in style whether they are any good at their jobs or not. They can afford insurance to protect those things. They can afford nice homes in nice neighborhoods to live in. They just can’t afford to pay more in taxes or to pay their employees a living wage so the poor can afford those things too. But when the pie shrinks, for whatever reason, not everybody’s share shrinks proportionally.

Its not a question of good vs evil people. That would be an easy problem to solve. Its much more insidious than that. Everybody wants to improve their own situation, and if necessary, they will do it at someone elses expense. People with similar interests tend to act in concert to further those interests. This is not a political tract, we’re describing a stochastic process here, like natural selection. Its just that some people have more resources to devote to this task than others. They don’t live paycheck to paycheck, they can afford to invest, and they have surplus resources they can deploy to protect themselves and their assets.

The rich are just like the poor in that they both want something for nothing (and yes, chicks for free!). Like all Economic Men, they want to maximize their benefits and minimize their costs to provide for them. The difference between the two is that the poor do not get to influence and control the economy, the law and the government like the rich do. When the poor do get to make the rules, you get places like Cuba and Venezuela–everybody goes hungry, except, of course, The Party.

We’re starting to find out now what it will be like when the rich get to make all the rules. But you can count on the rich never going hungry. In fact, they will do better than ever. Because you see, here, in the USA, the rich ARE The Party. And no matter how small the pie gets, the Party always sees to it it gets its share first. The rest of us are on our own.

In February 2015, three years into the supply-side economics experiment that would upend a once steady Midwestern economy, a hole appeared in Kansas’ finances.

To fill it, Gov. Sam Brownback took $45 million in public education funding. By April of this year, with the hole at $290 million, Brownback took highway money to plug it. A month later, state money for Medicaid coverage went into the hole, but the gap continued to grow.

Today, the state’s budget hole is $345 million and threatens the foundation of this state, which was supposed to be the setting for a grand economic expansion but now more closely resembles a battleground, with accusations and lawsuits flying over how to get the state’s finances in order.

The yawning deficits were caused by huge tax cuts, championed by Brownback and the Republican-dominated Legislature, that were supposed set the economy roaring. They didn’t.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/09/politics/sam-brownback-kansas/index.html

http://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-tax/gop-tax-plans-would-emulate-failed-kansas-experiment

The promised boom failed to materialize; Kansas’ infrastructure, schools, and bond rating suffered; and a bipartisan coalition eventually reversed the tax cuts.

Since the tax cuts took effect in January 2013, Kansas has lagged the nation in total private employment growth, economic growth, and small business formation (see chart).
The tax cuts wreaked havoc on Kansas’ ability to invest in its people and infrastructure. To balance its budget, the state employed gimmicks and one-time revenue, delayed road projects, cut services, and nearly drained funds it had set aside to prepare for the next recession. Two bond rating agencies downgraded Kansas due to its budget problems.
The Kansas Supreme Court has ruled that state funding for K-12 education is inadequate and set a June 30 deadline for lawmakers to raise revenue for schools. Kansas’ cuts in school funding since the Great Recession are among the nation’s deepest, with the tax cuts making it hard to restore school funding.
Bipartisan coalitions in both legislative houses in Kansas voted to reverse the tax cuts and reached the two-thirds supermajority needed to override Gov. Brownback’s veto in 2017.