Sam Brownback’s tax plan is failing, and it is ruining Kansas.

When the ultra-conservative governor took over Kansas in 2011, his main promise was to cut income taxes to the bare minimum for businesses and then later for the rest of the state, which Brownback claimed would place less of a burden on the owners of those businesses and cause revenue and job growth to increase.

However, since those tax cuts were put into place and over 330,000 businesses and farmers no longer had to pay any income taxes, the state has continuously failed to collect a satisfactory amount of income taxes to stay on par with the budget. According to CBS News, Kansas‘ income tax collections in 2017 will be over 15 percent off where they were just four years ago.

These failed projections, as well as several other ill-informed decisions on the behalf of Brownback over the last couple of years, have forced him to cut hundreds of millions of dollars from K-12 schools and universities, as well as postponing state required payments to the pension funds of the state’s public employees and almost illegally taking nearly a billion dollars from Kansas’ highway fund.

In fact, things got so bad at the beginning of 2016, the state’s Supreme Court ruled that if the funding formula was not fixed by June 30, Kansas schools would not be allowed to open on time for the next school year. The state legislature then continued to procrastinate until they were forced to come back for a special session, where they finally passed a “legal” plan to fund schools.

Perhaps the worst part of the ordeal is that Brownback refuses to admit how much he has messed up.

According to the Hays Daily News, Brownback said that while there have been issues, jobs are growing, which was the whole idea of the tax cuts from the start.

But a Kansas City Star report said otherwise, stating that there has been exactly a 0.0 percent non-farm job growth rate over the last year, placing the Kansas as the seventh worst state in the nation.

Brownback may be the easiest person to blame for the failed tax cuts, but he certainly is not the only person who has created the problems.

The state legislature, which is also highly conservative, has pushed through multiple bills that support Brownback’s policies to an extreme and are the main cause of businesses and the wealthy getting off the hook while the middle and working classes suffer much of the tax burden.

While things seem dark for Kansas, all hope is not lost. One bright sliver of hope was the recent election cycle, which saw several heavy Brownback supporters get voted out of the state legislature in the place of more moderate Republicans and Democrats who strongly oppose the governor.

If these new state legislators can live up to their promise and vote to repeal tax cuts while not allowing any new ones to go through, they can be the leaders in getting Kansas back on the right track.