Minnesota is now a "purple" state because many people like myself became disgusted with the DFL, it's masters in Education Minnesota, the arrogant, snobbish attitudes displayed by the Woodstock generation for 30 years and the realization that they are just plain wrong on so many issues.

Oh, and yes, we still care about the children. My 20 year old votes Republican.

I would also argue that the vibrancy comes from the State's investment in higher education, not just K-12. Also on top of U system is the plethora of private colleges.

In that regards, we blow the pants off of ND.

Mitch, what did you mean by this?

"that keeping open state colleges whose reasons to exist vanished thirty years ago benefits only more state employees"

Furthermore, the left may find it hard to KK on facts, b/c her editorial pieces do not contain a lot of facts, just opinion.

Fulcrum

The leftyblogger tries to make much of "things that don't exist" in Red States. I'll tell you something that doesn't exist in Red States:

Entrance fees for state parks.

I grew up in Missouri and live here now. My family from here recently drove down there and, during our visit to our MO relatives, we went to a nearby state park. Because I was driving, I pulled over at the park entrance to get out and pay the entrance fee. My Missouri relatives started laughing because Missouri does not charge visitors to go into state parks. (Having moved from there when I was 18, I forgot about that.) "Why would they charge people? We pay for the parks when we pay our taxes," was how one relative (herself a Dem) a put it. BTW, save any snarky comments about the quality of the MO state park. It meets or exceeds just about any state park (save Itasca) that we have in Minnesota.

Perhaps most important, my children (both in grade school) were particularly struck by the constrast between the two states' fiscal policies. "This is just silly (to charge people to go into a park)" opined the 10-year-old.
Future GOPers, both of them!

So...to pick up Kersten's point and apply it here, when people from MO migrate here (with the exception of the St. Louis crowd looking for higher welfare payments), they tend to ask questions about why our taxes are so high on one hand while we have to pay to get into a public park on the other hand. A good question, indeed.

We pay because the DFL has convinced that people of MN that the state can't operate without more and more of our money.

Look at the supporters of the stadium deal and the 1/2 cent additional sales tax. They say that they are small taxes but will raise millions or billions. How people don't get that those billions come out of their pockets?

I have never lived anywhere where people proudly display signs announcing they want to take more of my money. If they really wanted to pay more of their money, no one is stopping them.

Our state was controlled by Scandanavians? Gott im Himmel!

In regards to Jack's post, I agree with teh natural beauty of MO, but I have never visited their state parks, nor could I find any useful budget information on-line, however the MN DNR has some interesting information, but outdated:

It shows the sources and uses of funding for the DNR.
http://www.dnr.state.mn.us/aboutdnr/budget/whopays/index.html

This is also very useful in explaining sources and uses of funds.
http://files.dnr.state.mn.us/aboutdnr/budget/whopays/whopays0203.pdf

personally I have no problem paying those park fees b/c I feel strongly in perserving the natural amenities of our state.

Fulcrum

Fulcrum,

As a former Missourian, I can tell you that people in MO also feel strongly about preserving the state's natural beauty. They put their feelings into action when they pay their state's income taxes. They can't imagine paying an additional freight for getting into what is (and there is no getting around this) a public park.

I don’t have a problem with fees for State parks. It seems to me that the cost of maintaining them should be born as practicably as possible by those who use them. Insofar as we can shift funding from general tax levies to user fees, I see that trend as a good thing.

I'll add a two things to Mitch's list of why Minnesota has a more communitarian 'feel' than many other states.

1) A stable population. According to the wikipedia article on Minnesota, the state has a population of a little over five million. While I grew up in MN in the 1960's & 70's, the population was around 4 million. Since 1970 the US population has grown by 50% while Minnesota's population has grown by just 33%. It's much easier to build a communitarian spirit when not only were most of the people you know born in your state, most of their grandparents were as well.

2) A uniform ethnicity. While MN is not purely made up of people from Scandinavia/Germany, it's pretty darm close to being a monoculture. According to the Wikipedia article quoted above, the ethnic makeup of MN is just shy of 64% German & Scandinavian. Overall the state is 88% white. As with a stable population it's must easier to build a communitarian spirit when public facility users are people of the same ethnicity as public facility financers (eg, tax payers).

Ironically, if the DFL wants to regain their dominance of Minnesota state politics they may have to sacrifice diversity to do so; the model social1st states that the DFL would like Minnesota to emulate are not known for welcoming immigrants. Or perhaps they envision a multi-ethnic state dominated by an ethnic Northern European political elite? Ein volk, ein reich, ein partei?

Excellent post, Mitch.

And Jack Bauer, I agree...my husband and I have often wondered just who it is the "state" parks supposedly belong to? And the more we pay the less they do....there is no longer trash pick-up in our remote state parks (I know it's different at Itasca-my favorite place to be!) but at many others there seems to be no money for anything but putting up asinine signs keeping 4-wheelers out of a swamp (or what MIGHT be a swamp sometime in the future or WAS a swamp long ago). Plenty of money for control-none for amenities-even though we PAY. My father-in-law is a retired DNR Supervisor and he has watched the DNR go from being conservationists-people who conserve but USE the resources-to "environmentalists" who think that man should stay out and leave THEIR environment alone.

Oops...got carried away.

Good post, sir.

Just wait, as our population ages liberal-induced dependency on government will stand to crush us under the weight of higher taxes. Folks, government health care spending is going up 15 percent every two years - NOW. Imagine what's going to happen in 25 years when the number of seniors more than doubles. We need drastic changes in the way our government spends money or else we will suffer dire consequences. The solution can no longer be more government, we won't have enough young people in their prime earning years to afford the taxes that will take. We need to dismantle and refocus.

While in general I agree with user fees, it's interesting how many of them function as regressive taxes. $25 for an annual state park pass is a much bigger deal for some than others. As a forester by degree I can't help but think that user fees play a role in limiting access to our 'community' resources.
Great example of MN government in action: Carol Henderson, the founder and head of the DNR's Nongame Wildlife Program was recently reassigned (read: demoted). Carol's program was a model other states now follow, and more to the point, was SELF FUNDING. He generated revenue through sales of books and other educational materials, as well as the voluntary check off on the state income tax form).
Government solution to a successful program: punish the person who made it happen.

Any collection of people that moved, on purpose, to a bitterly cold wilderness in the Mid-19th-Century had to be planners and builders by their very nature. If you weren't, you'd starve and freeze to death come Winter. The people may have selected Minnesota, but Minnesota selected the survivors.

chriss,

How the *bleep* else are they going to find places to promote all the incompetents to?

Troy

Fulcrum,

I'm not sure the success of our education system can be attributed to spending. There is a great deal of research that shows once a point is reached where basic functions are funded there is no correlation between money spent on education and the learning acheived.

I would say that our superior K-12 education performance, at least relative to most other parts of the country, has more to do with the strong work ethic that was so much a part of the culture of our German and Scandanavian immigrant ancestors.

I say this as the son of a 30+ year elementary school teacher and district department head, who whole heartedly agrees.

As for higher education, I am an alum of the U of MN Carlson School. I can speak from experience that money did improve at least the reputation of the school and possibly the education quality. I attended prior to the Carlson family gift as an undergrad and several years after the large donations as a grad student.

However, it was not taxpayer money, but private donations by an "evil corporate billionaire" that turned it from a middle of the pack B-school to one with a fairly good reputation.

As to the post-secondary issue: Go figure. Postsecondary education, especially in the form of research universities, costs money - and Minnesota has almost an order of magnitude more people than NoDak.

NoDak does very well in postsecondary given the paucity of resources - UND and NDSU have some best-in-nation programs. But there's no substitute for critical mass of people, at the end of the day.

"Think about that. All these people are coming here from other states to enjoy the things that Minnesota has."

Speaking only for myself, I had no choice in moving here. It was either move or get a new job! Something the "Happy to pay for a better Minnesota" crowd never takes into account.

RBMN noted: "Any collection of people that moved, on purpose, to a bitterly cold wilderness in the Mid-19th-Century had to be planners and builders by their very nature."

Or idiots. Planners and builders or friggin' clueless, too-dumb-to-come-in-from-the-rain-much-less-move-to-some-nice-room-temperature-state idiots.

Tough call.

I look at it this way AC...the threat of our notoriously cold weather keeps the wimps out. That and the summers more than offset the one to two weeks of really cold weather that we get in December and January. Now if we could only do something about March....

Mitch, new reader here (past several hours, anyway). After reading this post, I feel compelled to write and tell you that You Got THAT Right! You nail it on the head when you write:

"Minnesota also had the advantage - or -curse - of being controlled by Scandinavians. The Scandinavian village tradition is intensely communitarian....whatever their size and government, tend to be....cohesive and controlling; at worst...passive-aggressive dens of back-biting vipers; at best...places that look out for their own."

I know this from first-hand experience. My grandfather, a Swede, co-founded a small town near Cambridge; I spent an idyllic childhood growing up in this small town, where I could walk across town to my grandma's house, without fear of harm. I'm talking about 6-7 years old, walking a mile or so, through town, across major highway, train tracks, and across fields. I felt safe. Today, I believe the freedom to roam and explore at will as a youngster made me trust the world around me. I went to church with my grandparents, went to the ball games with my grandpa, one of my uncles was All-American basketball player. I knew the shopkeepers, could roam around the Mercantile Store, and fetch goods from the Meat Locker, go to the 25 cent movies without my parents and stay for several showings, and walk back home alone as long as I got there before dark.

Granted, my grandparents were well-known to the townspeople, but everyone loved them. My grandfather helped to build the town and helped many people there. We definitely were a community, looking out for each other, being together and serving each other. My grandfather held that town together through thick & thin, and while he was still alive the town honored him with his own Day, a Day when everyone gets together at the bandstand to celebrate his place in the town's history! Even today, now as I type this to you, I'm choked up and my eyes are tearing up from the memory of that little town. And I'm almost 60 years old.

Years ago, long after my grandparents passed over into the Lord's arms, I wrote the following in about 15 minutes while thinking of them:

dry bones in Minnesota

you'd stand there arms crossed
in front, gathering your waist,
with floured hands, a pause
from oven to table, your silhouette
perfectly framed in stained glass,
staring out over potted pansies,
eyes following the sagging line,
a clothesline too close to ground,
bird bath rimmed in chikadees,
dry bones and brittle branches
skin scracked and peeling
old birch out back reminds you,
your own sore dusted marrow

you'd bend to tender roses hand picked
for you and he, now Grandpa's Place,
a place which claims my roots,
in the yard out back among Queen Anne's lace -
thinking back now
to earlier days of gathering;
lilies-of-the-valley, Becky, little bells &
cockleshells, kindling, and purple violets
placed within your favorite vase
upon the kitchen window shelf,
with little purpose hands,
where your tender gaze would rest
oh Grandma
how I miss you, and all of Braham's nest.

I'm including this little number to show you that even after leaving town as a teenager and moving out East, the mere memory of my life with the people of Braham, can evoke such strong emotions and speak to the cohesiveness you wrote of in your outstanding piece about why Minnesota is the way it is - a Light on the Hill of a Nation.

Preved Medved

Preved Medved

Thanks!!! furniture Very nice site.I enjoy being here.