The experiences of Louisiana and Kansas are particularly important because the federal government is running a version of those states’ economic policies. In December, President Trump signed a tax cut skewed overwhelmingly to the rich. Contrary to every independent analysis, he and congressional Republicans justified the plan with claims that it would turbocharge economic growth.

We know how this story will end. When the tax cut fails to produce an economic boom, the middle class and poor will be left to pay the price.

There is still a good solution available to Louisiana, though, and it happens to be the one that Kansas eventually chose: Undo the tax cuts.

Related: If you like interactive graphics, you can come up with your own solution to Louisiana’s budget crisis by choosing among a mix of spending cuts and tax increases. The calculator is a joint project of L.S.U.’s Manship School of Mass Communication, The Knight Foundation and The Advocate, and it was inspired by a federal-budget calculator that The New York Times created in 2010.

More on Texas. As I mentioned yesterday, the primary results in Texas this week suggest that Republicans remain heavy favorites to win statewide races there this year. The state just has more Republican voters than Democratic ones, and Musa al-Gharbi argues in an op-ed that those Republicans seem more enthusiastic about voting this year than many people realize. The highest-profile Texas race is Ted Cruz’s re-election campaign, versus an intriguing Democrat named Beto O’Rourke.

Democrats received better news in several House districts, as Dave Wasserman of the Cook Political Report noted. Democratic turnout in the primary was strong enough to give the party reason to believe it can compete in the three districts now represented by Republicans: Texas’s Seventh Congressional district (in the Houston area), the 32nd (in the Dallas area), and, most ambitiously, the 23rd (in the far Southwestern part of the state).

How does primary turnout say anything meaningful about general-election outcomes, anyway? The Upshot’s Nate Cohn explains.

Feeling overwhelmed by news? Turn off your news alerts, at least temporarily. I turned off mine months ago and have not regretted it. As Farhad Manjoo writes in The Times, “If something really big happens, you will find out.” I was pleased to see Farhad endorse daily email newsletters in that same column.