Here are 5 Republican governors who trashed their states in the name of conservatism

Here are 5 Republican governors who trashed their states in the name of conservatism

"1. Gov. Sam Brownback: The Kansas City Star described the former U.S. congressman’s tenure as governor as a “full-time disaster,” economically. Brownback has clung to his Tea Party principles as governor, slashing taxes and gutting state programs on the promise that he would create new jobs and boost the state’s lagging economy. Sadly for Kansans, tax cuts for the rich and trickle-down economics have worked as well there as they’ve worked anywhere else — which is to say, not at all. And even as the state’s economy has nose-dived, Brownback has clung more tightly to the conservative orthodoxy, that the only way to create jobs is to lavish money on the rich and force the poor to pull themselves up by their increasingly frayed bootstraps. In September, the Star said, “(T)he state announced it had lost 3,000 total jobs in August. That’s on top of the 5,100 jobs lost in July. Here’s even more dire news: The Sunflower State in the past 12 months gained a total of a puny 1,000 new jobs. That’s the fourth worst record in the entire United States, at .1 percent employment growth for the entire last year.” Last month, only 18 percent of Kansas voters said they approve of Brownback’s performance as governor. Ironically, 28 percent of voters in the deep red state approved of President Barack Obama’s performance as president, ten points higher than the governor. “This could be some of the lowest approval ratings of any Kansas governor in history,” said Bob Beatty, a political science professor at Washburn University to the Topeka Capital-Journal. “It’s epic"."