Bill Maher used contrasted the economic policies of California to the failed states Kansas and Louisiana.
Liberal policies have California with rainy day surpluses
Bill Maher knocked it out of the park. He is so much funnier and in point when he gets off his ill-informed narrative on a particular religion.
Maher contrasted the economies of Blue State California and Red States Kansas, and Louisiana. Both Red-States governors instituted trickle-down policies. California raised taxes on the wealthy to ensure it was fiscally healthy. The results speak for themselves. I blogged about the Kansas debacle here and here.
The Republican leadership speaks about the states being the laboratories of democracies. Yet when their theories fail and the theories of others are successful they remain willfully delusional.
Here is the text of the best part of his New Rule monologue.
If Republicans are going to keep calling states laboratories of democracy they have to start looking at the results from the lab. California raised taxes on the wealthy, a lot. And our economy is booming. We just passed France and India to become all by ourselves the world’s sixth largest economy soon to be fifth thanks, England.
Whereas states like Kansas and Louisiana that went back to the old trickle-down theory of ‘cut taxes on the rich and they’ll always do the right thing. Are financial catastrophes. The results from the lab are in. Our mice are thriving yours are dead. Now they say the definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over and expecting different results. But I’m beginning to think that’s actually the definition of being a conservative. Because it’s not like we haven’t tried trickle-down before — many times — it’s not new.
Despite the fact that when he took office Kansas Governor Sam Brownback said ‘we’ve got a different way and it works’. Yes somehow for the millionth time when rich folks got a big tax cut they pocketed it. And now Kansas is in a recession with a huge deficit. Down in Louisiana Bobby Jindal tried the same stupid thing that brown bag did and big surprise the same result, Billion dollar surplus became a 2 Billion dollar deficit. And now everything’s getting cut. Because apparently when you take in less money you have less money to spend — crazy. I guess you aren’t richer the less cash you have. Unless you’re Donald Trump.
So now let’s travel west. To the laboratory called California which not that long ago was being called an economic basket case unmanageable they said — a failed state. But this is when we had either Republican-led legislatures or a Republican governor who turned out to be such a disaster.
And here’s the part where the experiment becomes crystal clear. Because after Arnold’s left office we eliminated what scientists would call variables — in this case, the Republicans.
Democrats from governor on down control every office and voting body in this state. So we can really study what happens when liberal policies are tried unimpeded. And the only thing I have to say to Republicans about that is scoreboard.
Republicans claimed cap and trade would drive up utility bills but our electricity tab is now among the cheapest in the country. California gave illegal immigrants drivers licenses and college tuition. And conservatives said encouraging immigrants like that would destroy the economy. But it didn’t. Immigrants just take jobs Americans don’t want to do like raising their children.
So maybe we are being invaded by Latinos and Asians but it’s not making us weaker.
We did all the stuff conservatives warned us would make things even worse but the sky didn’t fall. Unemployment did. And growth shot up to over 4 percent and a $26 billion deficit became an $11 billion surplus for a rainy day, whatever that is. And that is mostly because we horror of horrors raised taxes on the rich. Fox News said we were insane, that the rich would flee the state.
Folks if states are laboratories of democracy, why are we wasting time replicating failed experiments? I thought the idea behind science is that you try something and if it doesn’t work you try something else. You run these experiments so you can see which ones work. And the ones that do are replicated to other states and the ones that don’t are sent to Florida.
I could not have said it any better.