I'm not sure when you got to the state Mitch, but I go back over 25 years, to the Al Que era. Now back then we faced a budget crisis, yes they have those things actually pretty regularly around here, much like everywhere else. After much wailing, handwringing and carring on the legislature did what it alway did. It raised taxes. And there was still a short fall. That's when Que did a really stupid thing. He fronted for the DFL and the Rino's on increaseing the sales tax, temporally of course, from 4 to 5 percent and then again from 5 to 6.5%, and increased the number of things subject to the tax.
The next year was an election year. Guess who lost the Governership by a huge margin? I recall laughing at the insistance of the legislture that the increase in the sales tax was temporary. I wish I had made a bet with some one back then. Que also ended up as a state joke for years afterward. People would have have their answering machines voice say things like, "This is former Gov. Que, WAIT DON'T HANG UP I NEED THIS JOB!"
You also notice how Jessie didn't run a second time when the economy started to turn south. So it seems most folks aren't REALLY willing to pay for a better Minnesota. By the way why don't those folks just send the state whatever they thing they should pay, instead insisting that we all pay more? Not very Christian is it?

Good post. I often regret reading any punditry pertaining to economics, from any part of the political spectrum, due to the hare-brained ways in which people assert cause and effect, without empirical foundation, all to fit their ideology. One would think that holding a Ph.D. in economics would deter preople from such intellectually dishonest exercises, but if one did, one would be wrong.

My take - top two priorities for any region's success in today's economy.

1. Higher education. Obviously you must have a reasonably good K-12 school system to make this work.
2. Transportation infrastructure provides the means to allow economic activity to occur. ie people to generate wealth.

I don’t see the Republicans in Minnesota willing to commit to these investments through increased taxes or able to truly find enough waste to cut in other areas to fully fund the needs. Pawlenty's $200 million gamble on gambling is a perfect example of this. We've had double-digit increases each year at the U for almost a decade. We have done basically nothing on transportation relative to our needs. We have completely and intentionally undercut the transit system in recent years.

I am not saying there is no waste. I am not saying there are no people taking advantage of the system. I am not saying that we shouldn't try to do more with less. I am saying that SOMETIMES you have to do more with more and the Republicans don't seem to be willing to do that right now. Additionally they don't appear all that pragmatic about financial concerns. After all - a anti-gay marriage bill is one large reason we didn't get a bonding bill done in the lowest interest period in 40 years. That is a rediculous waste. Regardless of your view on that issue we need enough pragmatism in our leaders to get the main things done. Instead we will be wasting millions in extra interest payments and that issue hasn't moved yet. In other words that whole legislative group just made us all Pay More for the Same MN.

Nick, if you could come close to empirically proving that spending more on education would have the desired effect, you could win some converts. However, people deeply suspect, with good reason, that the additional tax revenues will not provide that effect, and thus they are reluctant to tax themselves further.

Will - Obviously I don't have all the answers. That's why I'm here debating. However lets see if this argument has any traction. Higher Ed tuition is going up at rates that vastly outpace wage growth. At a certain point some people are priced out of the higher ed market. I think we can all agree on that

I've seen some data - I can dig for it if you really need me to - that suggest the average college grad earns over $1 million more than their High School dimploma counterpart over the course of their careers. Since the state would pick up additional taxes on the $1 million over their career we can justify the additional expenditure today.

Personally assuming this is true I would propose that we add funding today for higher ed (including trades) to hand out forgivable grants as gap financing to those with economic need. The grants are forgiven over some period of time, say 10 years, that the person is employed in the state earning above a certain threshold. Otherwise they are paid back like loans. This addresses the problems a lot of our neighboring states have where they are sending their subsidized graduates to MN.

K-12 is a whole nother bag. Let me think about it a bit more.

I think a little early to mid 20th century history on political parties in Minnesota is in order. The DFL came into being in the late 1940's with Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy leading the charge. Before that merger Minnesota was a three party state. The Farmer-Labor party was quite strong with Floyd B. Olson our governor during the depression. He died suddenly at age 44 in 1936. There was talk of Olson running for President one day, but his death ended that dream. Incidentally, State Highway 55 is named for Governor Olson. The Republicans were in power during WWII and up to the creation of the DFL. Probably because the Democratic and the Farmer-Labor parties were fighting for the same voters. After the merger the DFL suddenly had the majority.

One of the crucial points in discussing rationally ideas is to have reasons and evidence for your positions. If I say, "The Twins should trade for a power hitter" I should be prepared to answer the question, "Why, what good would it do?" If I want to say "Minnesota should raise taxes and increase spending on Higher Ed." I should be prepared to do the same. I think that one of the few good things that Gov. Turnbuckle did was to clearly point out that spending more money on Education is not the solution. "How much is enough?" If it is demonstrable, and people here can come up with the figures, that despite increasing the education budget at much higher that inflation has not helped, and that other states with substantially less spending are doing better jobs, then perhaps we should look at the system rather than pour more money into it. If I can not fill a bucket with water, I start looking at the bucket for holes/

I have to second Bill's comments about the education system. Minneapolis spends more than just about any of its neighbors on a per-pupil basis and horribly underperforms all of them by just about any yardstick you want to use; all of the information is available on the MDE website. So pretty obviously, throwing more money at them isn't going to help.

Well, my working class Swedish family got to MN in the mid-1800s, and we've always been interested in history, including regional history--something we read about, discuss, debate, and study. And understandably, though Scandinavian-Americans contributed to the profound immiseration of the state's Dakota, Ojibway, and African-American people, we have some pride in the fact that for decades the Scandinavian networks and influence did also allow Minnesotans to incorporate some lessons from the successful, solidaristic social democratic experience overseas, helping us avoid the hyper-inequality-based, race-to-the-bottom, working class-be-damned Southern strategy that's all the rage with you kids these days. (You know, like how Louisiana had all that natural resource, and yet still, when it was all pumped out, so were all the money and opportunities?) Anyway, now we find that the South didn't lose that civil war so much after all, did they? I congratulate your apparent lack of understanding of strong, historically-rooted political-economic currents in MN as another noble effort to contribute to the Great Big Fat Republican Revisionism Project. Go hegemons! For real historical analysis, I recommend you (and everyone) read historian Jennifer Delton's "Making Minnesota Liberal." While I don't always agree with the analysis, at least she provides a precious, precious glimpse of actual, historical data.

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