“It was supposed to increase the GDP, and it didn’t. The feds will have that same problem,” said state Senator Jim Denning, a conservative who originally supported the tax cuts. In a phone interview, Denning told me he had done his own economic modeling in 2012 and “proved to myself that the tax cut would work.” But the new policy did not prevent a rural recession in Kansas or a dip in its oil-and-gas business. “It generated hardly any measurable economic activity,” Denning said. By the beginning of this year, he had changed course and voted along with Democrats and a coalition of Republicans to reverse most of the cuts, erasing Brownback’s economic legacy. (The governor won’t be in office much longer: He has accepted a diplomatic post in the Trump administration and will resign once he’s confirmed by the Senate.)

Bollier recalled that Republicans had first tried to offset the steep cuts in tax rates by eliminating deductions and exemptions in the Kansas code. But those proposals could not get through the legislature, exacerbating the resulting increase in the state’s budget gap. “You’ve got to have pay-fors. You can’t do it just by cutting taxes,” she concluded.

A similar debate is now playing out in Congress. Republican leaders, led by House Speaker Paul Ryan, wanted to raise as much as $1 trillion in revenue over a decade by instituting a border-adjustment tax, which would help pay for a reduction in tax rates for individuals and businesses. But conservatives rebelled, forcing Ryan to abandon the idea. The same fate could befall a proposal to raise more than $1 trillion by eliminating the state and local tax deduction, which is facing opposition from Republicans in high-tax states like New York, New Jersey, and California. Suggestions to pair tax cuts with reductions in spending on Medicare, Medicaid, and welfare programs are likely to go nowhere, too.

If Republicans in Washington can pass anything at all, it is likely to be a straight, temporary tax cut that adds to the deficit, which is easier for Congress to do because the federal government, unlike states, does not have to balance its budget. “That, to me, is a very poor decision,” Bollier said.

Kansas Republicans do credit the national GOP for proposing more modest tax cuts than they ultimately enacted. The congressional plan calls for a one-time reduction in income taxes, while Brownback signed a law that set automatic decreases with the ultimate goal of eliminating the state income tax entirely. Kansas’s slashing of the rate for so-called “pass-through” entities, designed to bolster hiring at mom-and-pop businesses, proved to be even more of a budget buster. Nearly 400,000 businesses took advantage of the exemption, reducing the state’s annual tax revenue by between $200 million and $300 million, according to the nonpartisan Tax Foundation.