Perhaps even conservatives can only be fooled so many times before they get wise. In Kansas, Democrat Paul Davis has pulled even with Republican incumbent Sam Brownback in the race for governor. Davis has even received the endorsement of numerous Republican officials across Kansas, who find Brownback’s dalliance with Voodoo Economics too spooky for their taste.

Credit for the term “Voodoo Economics” goes to George Bush. While he was competing for the 1980 GOP presidential nomination, he applied it to describe Ronald Reagan’s economic proposals, which relied on the notion that tax cuts pay for themselves. To George Bush, and to most of us, Reagan’s policies seemed like a crackpot idea at the time. Our experience over the past 30 years have borne out Bush’s skepticism.

Fiscally, the US never recovered from Reagan’s tax cuts. Deficits remained sky high for twelve years, right through the departure of his successor from the White House in 1993. That not-so-grand experiment only ended with Clinton’s tax increases, which, instead of bringing the disasters predicted by conservatives, delivered the longest economic expansion in US history, and replaced Reagan and Bush’s deficits with surpluses projected far into the future.

Under Bush Duh, the US again endured the folly of Voodoo Economics. His tax cuts gave away the surplus to the very rich, and left the country’s fiscal health permanently compromised. The cure only came via Obama’s tax increases on the wealthy – and the sustained economic recovery that’s (again) happened with conservatives (again) predicting gloom and doom.

But these experiences werent enough to deter Kansas from embarking on the very same, failed supply-side Voodoo. Conservative Sam Brownback was elected governor in 2011, and in 2012 pushed through a massive tax cut, slashing the top income tax rate by 25%, and eliminating income taxes on small businesses entirely. Brownback was hoping for a little of that ol’ black magic: to see state tax revenue grow, even though almost all Kansans were going to be paying a lower tax rate.

For all its voodoo, Kansas is now in deep budgetary doo-doo – because Voodoo Economics has failed Kansas too. With tax receipts falling short of expenses by hundreds of millions of dollars, education, along with other government services have been slashed, and the state’s credit rating has been downgraded. And in addition to all that red ink, Kansas is adding jobs at a slower pace than the national average. With inept governance, deficits, and weak job growth, one might regard today’s Kansas as a time capsule of the Bush Duh years – from which even Kansas Republicans seem eager to escape.