Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback (R), like Republican governors all across the country, aims to implement a regressive tax plan that involves cutting income taxes for the rich while, in his case, maintaining a sales tax hike that primarily hurts the poor. The sales tax increase was supposed to be temporary when it was adopted in 2010, but Brownback now wants to make permanent.

Sales taxes disproportionately impact the poor, who are more likely to spend all or most of their income. According to an analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, Brownback’s plan will raise taxes on the poorest Kansans, but still lose hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue due to huge tax cuts for the rich:

– The poorest 20 percent of Kansas taxpayers would pay 0.2 percent more of their income in taxes each year, or an average increase of $22.

– The middle 20 percent of Kansas taxpayers would pay 0.2 percent less of their income in taxes each year, or an average cut of $104.

– Upper-income families, by contrast, reap the greatest benefit with the richest one percent of Kansans, those with an average income of over a million dollars, saving an average of $6,528 a year.

The plan would cost the state $340 million in revenue, despite hiking taxes the poor. And Kansas already has a regressive tax system, with the poorest residents paying a rate more than twice as high as the richest 1 percent.

Former President Bill Clinton today warned House Democrats about embracing austerity as a solution to the U.S.’s economic woes. “Everybody that’s tried austerity in a time of no growth has wound up cutting revenues even more than they cut spending because you just get into the downward spiral and drag the country back into recession,” he said.

For evidence, House Democrats can gaze across the Atlantic at the United Kingdom, where austerity has put the country on the brink of a triple-dip recession, while doing next to nothing to reduce its deficit. According to the latest budget projections from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a London-based independent think tank, the UK will be borrowing £65 billion more next year thanks to austerity’s dampening effect on growth:

A significant part of the downgrade in official forecasts has come in the last two years. In response, further spending cuts have been pencilled in for after 2014–15 — the end of the current spending review period — to offset fully the increase in forecast structural borrowing: but not until 2017–18. A worse economic outlook since November 2010 has pushed up borrowing forecasts for 2014–15 by £65 billion. Mr Osborne has chosen to offset only £1 billion of this. In this sense, he is running looser fiscal policy over this parliament than he intended back in 2010. [...]

Our baseline public finance forecast shows a more than 50:50 chance that (on a like-for-like basis) borrowing this year will be higher than it was in 2011–12.

As the New Yorker’s John Cassidy put it, “In short, the U.K. experience shows how austerity policies, when applied without regard to the state of the economy, often lead to more government borrowing and debt creation, not less. In the past few years, we’ve seen pretty much the same thing happen in other European countries: Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and now Italy and Spain.”

The U.S., instead, opted for stimulus in 2009, and has returned to slow growth. But unless Congress prevents it, there is a healthy dose of austerity for the U.S. right around the corner.

Former president Bill Clinton urged House Democrats to avoid the push for immediate austerity at a party retreat in Virginia today, pointing to Europe’s failed deficit-cutting experiment that has led to further economic malaise instead of prosperity.

The American economy, bolstered by a major stimulus bill in 2009, has slowly recovered from the Great Recession, but unemployment remains high and growth slower than it should be. The U.S. has already cut more than $2.5 trillion from future deficits, but with the automatic spending cuts brought about by the 2011 debt ceiling deal fast approaching, Clinton pushed Democrats to avoid calls for “conventional austerity measures”:

The debt problem can’t be solved right now by conventional austerity measures, and that’s why Paul Krugman is right when he keeps talking about all these — everybody that’s tried austerity in a time of no growth has wound up cutting revenues even more than they cut spending because you just get into the downward spiral and drag the country back into recession.

Watch:

European countries that have attempted to spur growth by rapidly reducing their deficits have failed to accomplish either goal and have instead driven their economies back into recession. The United Kingdom’s deficit has hardly gotten smaller despite its austerity efforts and the country is on the verge of a triple-dip recession. Greece and Spain both have unemployment rates above 25 percent. Even Germany, Europe’s largest economy, is on the brink of another recession. The Eurozone as a whole slipped back into recession in November and its unemployment rate is at record highs.

Still, politicians in the United States have failed to heed Europe’s warnings, pursuing deficit reduction instead of job growth. Republicans blocked the American Jobs Act, which economists estimated would have spurred growth and created more than a million jobs, and have instead pursued damaging budget cuts that would have the opposite effect even amid evidence that the original American push for stimulus worked better than the European approach.

One year ago tomorrow, the Department of Justice and 40 state attorneys general announced a $25 billion foreclosure fraud settlement with five of the nation’s biggest banks. The settlement was meant to provide substantial relief to homeowners who were improperly (or even illegally) foreclosed upon, and also help others on the brink of foreclosure.

However, the implementation of the settlement has been much more complicated. As the Campaign for a Fair Settlement noted in a statement today:

The National Mortgage Settlement was supposed to help people stay in their homes. But one year later we have yet to see a full accounting of how the money has been spent, states are diverting large portions of the funds to meet their deficits instead of helping homeowners, and the hardest hit — particularly communities of color — are not seeing relief. Short sales and dual tracking continue, and the banks themselves are spending more to move people out of their homes than to keep people in them. The bottom line: a settlement that promised justice and relief for homeowners has instead continued business as usual for mortgage servicers and financial institutions.

As Propublica detailed in this map and Enterprise Community Partners laid out in this report, states all across the country have siphoned off funds meant to aid homeowners and used them for a host of other non-housing related programs. Many states simply plunked the money into their general funds to plug budget gaps.

Several states, meanwhile, have attempted to end the more pernicious acts of mortgage servicers on their own. California approved a Homeowners’ Bill of Rights, for instance, while Minnesota Democrats are attempting to adopt many protections not offered at the federal level.

Federal spending is scheduled to reach historic lows thanks to the Budget Control Act, which placed caps on spending as part of the deal to raise the debt ceiling in the summer of 2011. Non-defense spending is already 14 percent lower than it has been at any time in the last half-century, and it could go even lower if the so-called “sequester,” a series of automatic budget cuts that will begin to take effect at the beginning of March, is allowed to occur.

The drop in domestic spending has already devastated many programs on which Americans depend. But on March 1, those cuts will get even deeper when the first $85 billion of sequester cuts take effect.

That will have a substantial impact on food safety, education, law enforcement, and safety net programs, according to estimates from Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee. And if the sequester is left in place for the full year, it will cut $1.5 trillion and those effects will only get worse:

Food safety: The Food and Drug Administration is already facing serious cuts, jeopardizing its ability to safely inspect foreign food imports. Under the sequester, the U.S. Department of Agriculture would be forced to furlough thousands of workers for weeks at a time, causing food processors to shut down. That would cost the industry billions of dollars while further limiting food inspections. Other studies estimate that there would be 600 fewer food inspectors at meat and poultry plants.

Aviation safety: The first round of cuts would force the Federal Aviation Administration to furlough 10 percent of its staff each day, reducing the number of air traffic controllers and regulators on the job at any given time. That could mean the loss of 1,200 air traffic controllers over the next year if the sequester remains in place.

Women, Infants, and Children programs: WIC, which helps low-income women provide for their children up to age 5, is already facing significant reductions under budget caps that could kick 970,000 women out of the program. The first round of the sequester would cut $353 million, meaning 600,000 women and their children would lose access.

Early Childhood Education: As many as 70,000 children would be cut from Head Start and Early Head Start under the first round of cuts, while 30,000 parents would lose access to child care services. Head Start, early childhood education, and child care for working parents provide huge benefits to families and their children. One study in California found that Head Start results in $9 of benefits for every dollar spent on the program.

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Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) has joined the growing list of Republican governors pushing income tax cuts for the wealthiest citizens of his state, and like those other governors, his plan would raise taxes on the poor to pay for it.

Kasich’s plan would cut income tax rates by 20 percent and some business tax rates in half, and it would pay for the plan by levying sales taxes on goods and services that were previously exempt. Since sales taxes are inherently regressive, Kasich’s plan would raise taxes on the poorest 60 percent of the state’s residents by as much as $77. The top 1 percent, though, would see an average tax cut of $10,369, according to an analysis by Policy Matters Ohio:

The proposal would provide a $10,369 annual tax cut on average to taxpayers in the top 1 percent of the income spectrum, who made more than $335,000 in 2012. The bottom fifth of taxpayers, making less than $18,000 a year, would see an average increase of $63. Those in the middle fifth, making between $33,000 and $51,000 in 2012, would come out about even, averaging an annual tax increase of $8.

The poor in Ohio already pay more of their income in taxes than do the rich. The bottom fifth of Ohio taxpayers pay 11.6 percent of their income in taxes, while the top 1 percent pays an effective rate of 8.1 percent, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. That disparity exists because of sales taxes: the bottom 20 percent pay 6.7 percent of their income in sales taxes compared to just 1 percent for the wealthiest taxpayers.

Ohio isn’t unique in that situation. Across the country, states tax the poor at higher rates than they do the rich, but that hasn’t stopped Republicans in Nebraska, Louisiana, North Carolina, Kansas, and Indiana from proposing tax plans that would cut taxes for the rich while raising them on the poor.