In South East Kansas, not too far from Pittsburg, sits Big Brutus. One of the largest coal shovels ever erected. It lays dormant now, out of work. While Big Brutus is a historical monument, the job losses in Kansas aren’t historical, they are happening monthly. And like miners of an earlier era, the Brownback economy is the Republican canary in the mine — and reports like the one issued today tell you the canary is on life support.
Here are the lowlights.
▪ The state lost 5,600 jobs from June to July.
▪ The unemployment rate jumped to 4.1 percent from 3.8 percent in June.
▪ Over the last year, Kansas has actually shed 4,500 jobs.
▪ The Sunflower State’s “growth” rate over that 12 months is a minus 0.3 percent — 5th worst in the nation. Only Wyoming, North Dakota, Louisiana and Oklahoma were behind Kansas.
▪ Kansas had employment of 1,395,700 in July 2016 — or a stunning 600 fewer jobs than when Brownback’s second term started way back in January 2015.
▪ Finally, Kansas is nowhere close to adding the 2,000 jobs a month that Brownback had pledged during his re-election campaign in 2014.
Yael T. Abouhalkah’s assessment of the Brownback economy paints a gloomy picture. What’s worse for Republicans, though, is that Donald Trump is traveling the nation like a snake oil salesman and offering the Kansas “solution” as bottled elixir for the nation’s ills, and the data to back up his argument looks worse every day.