Kansas Auctions Off Sex Toys To Help Close Budget Gap

[Webster]

Think Progress: Kansas Auctions Off Sex Toys To Help Close Budget Gap

They may be squeezing school budgets and undermining public services, but Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback’s (R) trickle-down tax cuts are at least bringing joy to one unlikely group: people looking to spice up their sex lives.

The state is setting up an auction to sell off hundreds of pornographic videos alongside vibrating underwear, bondage tape, handcuffs, paddles, and thousands of other adult items seized over the summer when the Kansas Department of Revenue shut down a chain of adult superstores that hadn’t paid their taxes.

The man who owned the five Bang stores had failed to pay the state nearly $164,000 in taxes, according to the Topeka Capital-Journal. The department returned the items to the owner on the condition that he auction off the seized property in order to pay his debts.

Kansas’ projected budget shortfall between now and 2016 is well over $200 million.
Brownback created that budget hole by slashing the state’s tax rates repeatedly since winning the job in 2010. Under his leadership, he pledged that Kansas would be a “real, live experiment” with conservative small-government economic policies, and promised the experiment would produce job growth. His tax cuts were targeted primarily to the wealthy and to businesses. Brownback’s push went further than national-level Republican anti-tax politicians are able to go: he eliminated all taxes on income reported through a small business entity rather than through regular wages.

In addition to criticizing the top-heavy nature of Brownback’s tax cuts, opponents warned at the time that the governor’s policies would put large holes in Kansas’ already-stretched budget. Now that the tax cuts have had time to kick in, that warning is proving prescient. For just one three-month period this spring, the state collected $334 million less than it had anticipated. The state’s budget officials expect a further $245 million shortfall from the 2017, 2018, and 2019 fiscal years.

Even prior to Brownback’s tax cuts, the state was underfunding its school system so severely that the Kansas Supreme Court found its education budget unconstitutional. The cuts have made that difficult problem impossible to solve, and the best response that Kansas legislators have been able to find to the court’s demands is a budget scheme that “[takes] from Peter to pay Paul,” in the words of one of the lawyers who brought the school funding case.

If his policies had produced the boom times he promised, maybe these budget restraints wouldn’t be inflicting such pain. But instead of unleashing growth in Kansas, the state’s economy is floundering. Poverty is rising in the state. After 20 years of keeping pace with the national economy, Kansas has now fallen behind the national average for economic growth. Kansas officials say that personal income growth will lag the national income growth rate this year and again in 2015. The state even lost its AA+ credit rating on government debts from Standard & Poors in August after the agency decided the fiscal situation required a downgrade.

With Brownback’s government auctioning sex toys to try to keep its budget holes from gaping any wider, it might be tempting to charge the conservative Christian governor with hypocrisy. Brownback’s political career is built as much on social conservatism as fiscal conservatism, and his fellow Republicans in the state House of Representatives have voted twice in recent years to impose restrictions on exactly the kinds of adult businesses that fell prey to tax seizures earlier this summer.

But since it is illegal to destroy seized property, auction arrangements like this are standard operating procedure for tax cases that can’t be resolved more simply, Department of Revenue spokeswoman Jeannine Koranda said in an interview. “This is a business that is able to operate legally in Kansas that was not paying its taxes, and when we have gone through a whole series of [collection] attempts that have failed” such as tax liens and banking levies, Koranda explained, shutting a company down is the last resort. “We’re handling this just like we have other seizures.”

...maybe its' just me, but things must be really bad in Kansas if you're having to sell sex toys to help raise revenue...thoughts?

 

[Nebulous's iconNebulous]

Money is money I suppose

 

[Webster]

Money is money I suppose

True...but this should be a lesson on why taxes are important as well; basic economic rule, Nebulous: the lower the tax rate, the less revenue you collect.

 

[Nebulous's iconNebulous]

Money is money I suppose

True...but this should be a lesson on why taxes are important as well; basic economic rule, Nebulous: the lower the tax rate, the less revenue you collect.

Well yeah, that's common sense.

 

[Webster]

Money is money I suppose

True...but this should be a lesson on why taxes are important as well; basic economic rule, Nebulous: the lower the tax rate, the less revenue you collect.

Well yeah, that's common sense.

That would be correct...common sense is also something that seems to be missing from the right at present...

 

[Webster]

...apparently, Last Week Tonight's John Oliver has some ideas on how Kansas can raise extra revenues...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGtb1YfJ2vo

[Caution: Video definitely NSFW]

Kansas has a serious problem. They've lowered taxes so much they can't pay their bills, and they've cut education funding so far that the court is forcing them to restore some of it, making that deficit even bigger.

Still, Governor Brownback does have some revenue choices he can make, and one of them is selling vibrators and other adult toys seized when an adult toy distributor failed to pay taxes in a timely fashion, measly as they are.

John Oliver wants to help. We all should help. Kansas needs us. So here's the deal. Oliver is right. People should go to the auction website and overbid on the various sex toys there, including the "icicles," which in addition to being hand-crafted, are also hand-blown. Let your imagination carry the rest of that, or just watch the video.

As Oliver says, "Just do it, Kansas. Because while your state legislature has f*cked you into this, this is your chance to go and f*ck yourselves out of it."

You heard the man...get on it.

 

[WHO IS SERAFIN]

Nothing wrong with cutting taxes to a point where the people keep a overwhelming majority of there money.

The problem comes when they keep spending more then they take in whether it be from high taxes or low taxes government needs to reign in there own house. And wasting money on social programs. Dont look for ways to cut waste in government and just keep chugging along on wasteful government spending. When they keep turning a blind eye to corruption in government that wastes and steals countless tax dollars.

Cutting taxes works every time for the people and economy, it just does not always work for government when government is never naturally a efficient entity. But needs to pushed, poked and pried to become one.

 

[Webster]

Nothing wrong with cutting taxes to a point where the people keep a overwhelming majority of there money.

Yeah, if you want lousy schools, crumbling infrastructure, decrepit roads, failing public services...need I go on? And people still insist on votng Republican? Are people that stupid?!?

No, wait, Liberty...don't answer that; just look at Texas...

 

[WHO IS SERAFIN]

Nothing wrong with cutting taxes to a point where the people keep a overwhelming majority of there money.

Yeah, if you want lousy schools, crumbling infrastructure, decrepit roads, failing public services...need I go on? And people still insist on votng Republican? Are people that stupid?!?

No, wait, Liberty...don't answer that; just look at Texas...

That would be every liberal city in America.

2013 Top 10 Most Dangerous Cities All Run By Democrats
The FBI recently released 2013's top 10 most dangerous cities and surprise! They're all run by Democrats. Patriot Nation News breaks down the cities and their Democratic mayors:

Camden, NJ —Mayor Dana Redd, Democrat
Flint MI — Mayor Dayne Walling, Democrat
Detroit MI — Mayor Dave Bing/Mike Duggan, Democrat(s)
Oakland, CA — Mayor Jean Quan, Democrat
St. Louis, MO — Mayor Francis Slay, Democrat
Cleveland, OH — Mayor Frank Jackson, Democrat
Gary, IN — Mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson, Democrat
Newark NJ — Mayor Corey Booker/Luis Quintana, Democrat(s)
Bridgeport, CT — Mayor Bill Finch, Democrat
Birmingham, AL — Mayor William A. Bell, Democrat
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2014/03/12/fbi-releases-2013-most-dangerous-cities-and-theyre-all-run-by-democrats-n1807969

Big Dem Cities, Big Dem Poverty

St. Louis’s poverty rate is 26 percent overall, and four-in-ten children live in poverty. Like Detroit, the city has experienced a major population decline, from 850,000 in the mid-20th century to 318,000 in 2013. Last year’s Annual Performance Report gave the city’s public schools a rating of 24.6 percent on a scale of zero to 100 percent. The city, which is also reeling from $640 million in unfunded pension liabilities, is currently rated the third most dangerous large city in the nation. St. Louis’s current mayor is Francis G. Slay, who has served since 2001. There hasn’t been a Republican mayor in St. Louis since 1949.

Newark, New Jersey’s poverty rate is 26.1 percent. Its former mayor, Cory Booker, who was recently elected to the United States Senate, was the latest in a long, unbroken line of Democratic mayors dating back 106 years to 1907. Former Newark Mayor Sharpe James was convicted of five counts of fraud in 2008. Yet he is hardly an anomaly: with the exception of Booker, every Mayor of Newark since 1962 has been indicted for crimes committed during their tenure in office. Between 2005 and 2012, the city’s population declined from 281,063 to 278,906, while violent crime totals increased from 2,821 to 3,219.

The residents of Cincinnati, OH are afflicted by a poverty rate of 27.4 percent overall, with a staggering 53.1 percent child poverty rate as of 2012. Former Democratic Mayor Mark Mallory left recently-elected Democrat Mayor John Cranley a $60 million deficit throughout 2012, and an annual budget shortfall of 20 percent, leading many to believe that bankruptcy is imminent. Cincinnati’s last non-Democrat mayor, Charter Party member Arnold L. Bortz, served until 1984.

In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 28 percent of city residents overall live in poverty, a number that balloons to 40 percent in terms of child poverty. Democratic voter registration outnumbers Republican registration by a six-to-one margin in a city where the last Republican mayor to hold office, Bernard Samuel, was voted out in 1952. Current mayor Michael Nutter is presiding over a city with the lowest credit rating of the country’s five most populous cities ($8.75 billion in outstanding debt) and a pension system that is only funded at a level of 47.6 percent. Last March, city officials voted to close 9 percent of the city’s public schools due to a five-year $1.35 billion spending gap.

And it just keeps going and going.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/big-dem-cities-big-dem-poverty/

 

[Webster]

*reads Liberty's most recent post* ...and what, pray tell, have conservatives ever done except royally screw up America whenever they're in charge?