A state budget's (elective) surgery

Debates about tax cuts often play out in pretty fuzzy terms. How do you feel about the role of government? What size tax burden feels fair to you? Which party is in power, and how trustworthy do its leaders look on television?

This isn't necessary. Tax cuts put actual money in actual people's pockets, so we can ask nice concrete questions like "how much?" and "which people?" And they make actual reductions to revenue used to fund actual government functions, so we can ask things like "how hard will this hit the government?" and "what might the government stop doing as a result?"

Federal fiscal policy can be hard to understand, with its economically strategic use of deficits (and its politically strategic condemnation of the same). State and local policy is a little more straightforward: if you give the government less money, before long it's going to have to spend less. Some conservatives think this is pretty much by definition a good thing, and a lot of them have a lot of state-level power right now. In 2012, Kansas enacted massive tax cuts. State leaders promised economic growth, but this hasn't quite materialized. Now the state's in quite the fiscal mess.