Kansas Senate Bill Substitute HB 2117 published by the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), supported by "The Wall Street Journal", supply-side economist Arthur Laffer, and anti-tax leader Grover Norquist. By 2017, state revenues had fallen by hundreds of millions of dollars causing spending on roads, bridges, and education to be slashed, but instead of boosting economic growth, growth in Kansas remained consistently below average. That year, the Republican Legislature of Kansas voted to roll back the cuts and after Brownback vetoed the repeal overrode his veto. As a conservative Republican Senator from Kansas, Brownback had been reelected by large margins in 1998 and 2004, and
The J Curve (book) The J Curve (book) The J Curve: A New Way to Understand Why Nations Rise and Fall (Simon & Schuster: 2006) is a book by political scientist Ian Bremmer. It was named a "Book of the Year" in 2006 by "The Economist". Bremmer's J Curve describes the relationship between a country's openness and its stability; focusing on the notion that while many countries are stable because they are open (the United States, France, Japan), others are stable because they are closed (North Korea, Cuba, Iraq under Saddam Hussein). According to Bremmer, a government's motivations differ dramatically depending on where they