Let’s take a look back to last May.

I started this post at the end of the session, last May, amid the DFL was doing its endzone happy dance over having gotten their way on literally everything during the session,

Here’s Rep Long – who in normal times one would be tempted to call “one of Minneapolis’s more annoying legislators”, but “progressivism” has lapped him a few times on that count:

They sure loved to prattle on about “gridlock being over”, didn’t they?

The Strib cheered on the home team! Here was a rare photo from last year of Governor Walz not eating something:

And here, one of them rejoices that the trains will run on time.

Or something like that.

This tweet caught my eye last spring – someone had a clue what was going on.

Today, of course, the “surplus” (which wasn’t) is long gone. There’s going to be a deficit in the next biennium, even if the economy hangs on.

All as predicted.

A Look Ahead To The Ghost Of DFL Excuse-Making Future

Budget deficit of $2.5 Billion Plus?

I was a punk fan from the beginning. I may have been one of two people in Jamestown to have had a copy of the Sex PIstols first album. I don’t think my parents would have approved – but that was kinda the point, wasnt it?

I’ve been a fan of Pistols lead singer John “Johnny Rotten” Lydon – the Elvis Presley of punk rock as the leader of the Sex Pistols from 1975-1978 – since I was a teenager. And I’ve gotten to be more of a fan over the past 20-odd years, as he’s shown himself to be quite a political and social free thinker, breaking from the monolithic showbiz narrative on a *lot* of issues (albeit not all, but then, he’s John Lydon).

But…

…I was today years old when I learned that Lydon was married to the same woman for 44 years, withdrawing from much of public life for the past five years to take care of her while she was suffering from of Alzheimers before dying last month.

He also raised the children of his wife’s daughter (Ariane “Ari Up” Forster, also a punk icon) – the oldest two after Forster gave up trying to raise them (they’d essentially grown up wild, almost as art projects, and as teenagers couldn’t read, write or form complete sentences) and the youngest after Up died of cancer in 2010.

Now, if I could just run down the accuracy of that persistent rumor that Joe Strummer had become a bit of a Tory before he died, that’d be a perfect Christmas present.

In the book Red Storm Rising – Tom Clancy’s second novel, released around 1985, at the height of the Cold War, and tho only Clancy novel that didn’t focus on Jack Ryan, his family and his professional and social circle – the protagonist, obscure intelligence analyst John Toland, connects the dots among several events – a Chechen terrorist attack on an oil refinery, its attendant economic turmoil – and becomes concerned about a possible Soviet invasion.

The line that connects all the dots? The Soviet government releases an updated version of the 1938 film Aleksander Nevsky, Sergei Eisenstein’s historical drama about the eponymous Nevsky, getting the quarreling Russian nobility to shelve their differences and set about repelling a Teutonic invasion in the Middle Ages.

Am I butchering the plot worse than Nevsky butchering the hapless Germans? Perhaps. Here – watch for yourself:

Finer plot points notwithstanding, the movie is intensely nationalistic – which got the film shelved, and then un-shelved after Barbarossa and the invasion of the USSR.

The point – as John Toland put it in Red Storm Rising – was that whenever the Communists wanted to whip up a nationalistic frenzy against the West, they’d trot out Nevsky. Which was, indeed, the case in the book, as the USSR let slip the dogs and tanks and artillery of war, in what became one of the better, and final, fictional novels of World War 3.

So, Hollywood is doing a fictional “civil war” movie, featuring an A-list….

…well, B+-list cast, a big-name sci-fi director, an apparently significant budget…:

…and a fairly bizarre premise: that DC, New York and the Midatlantic states, Texas and Califonria will be allied against, I suspect, a bunch of of blockheaded rednecks and roobz from Florida and most of “flyover land”.

The movie is billed as science-fiction, but the sides drawn appear to be more fiction than science;

Little has been released about the plot, although speculation is running hot:

 The reasoning behind the seemingly bizarre alliance of Texas and California in the film points to the notion that the war isn’t over Democrat and Republican politics but more about Offerman’s corrupt three-term Presidency. The United States federal government has apparently disavowed its allegiance to the United States Constitution and is now held under the budding dictatorship of Offerman’s tyrannical President.

 The reasoning behind the seemingly bizarre alliance of Texas and California in the film points to the notion that the war isn’t over Democrat and Republican politics but more about Offerman’s corrupt three-term Presidency.ent.

So, maybe it’s not a Blue-Vs.-Red thing, as such.

But coming in the immediate aftermath of a state supreme court ruling that has just served as a Reichstag fire for those on both sides insisting that they are fighting intractable anti-democratic forces on both sides – a decision that has raised the temperature and lowered the signal-to noise ratio and increased the likelihood of a, let’s just call it “less than reasoned” response to any election result next year, is this really the media cue we want to be sending out?

“Depends on which “we” you’re talking about, doesn’t it, Mitch?”

Why, yes – it does.

SCENE: Mitch BERG is loading some garage junk into a truck. He doesn’t notice Avery LIBRELLE, whjo is walking up the alley writing down the addresses of homes without handicap parking spots.

LIBRELLE: Merg!

BERG: Uh…

LIBRELLE: Christian Nationalists can’t handle freedom of religion! They’re having a cow and melting down over a Satan Club at a school!

BERG: Huh.

LIBRELLE: What do you have to say about that?

BERG: Other than “Satanism is a religion in exactly the same way as “The Onion” is, only even less funny? It exists only to mock faith. Well, to mock Christianity. It’s not a worldview. It’s a running adolescent jape.

LIBRELLE: You’re gonna crrrryyyyyyyyyyyy…

BERG: So, if a school had an “Amos and Andy” club, or a “Speedy Gonzales” club, or an “Apu” Club, or a “Boring Basketball” club, do you think Blacks, Latinos, Indian-Americans or women might take umbrage?

(But LIBRELLE is already skipping, literally, down the alley.

And SCENE>

I’m a little old-fashioned in a lot of ways. I guess part of it goes along with being a conservative. And/or a Christian. And/or a decent human being.

Which is why seeing the current statistics about the beliefs of the younger Gen-Zs seem so very catastrophic to me.

Huge percentages of people from the late teens through late 20s:

• Have no idea who Hitler was
• Don’t know what the Holocaust was, and have no idea that there was a concerted attempt to rid the world of Jews, which was about 70% successful in Europe.
• Think removing Israel from the map is just fine.
• Believe that October 7 was an Israeli “blue on blue” or false flag, or just faked.

It’s to them that I commend this Israeli documentary about the massacre at the Nova dance party – drawn entirely from footrage from partygoers and the terrorists themselves.

It’s all in Hebrew and Arabic – but it’s easy enough, and utterly terrifying, to figure out for yourself what’s going on anyway, as the film spirals from ecstasy-soaked rave through “Iron Domes” bursting in the distance, to swarms of goons with AKs and RPGs murdering and grenading civilians, fleeing and hiding for their lives.

And in my unguarded moments tempted to tell actual humans to force their acquaintances who believe it’s all a conspiracy to watch it. Jamming it down their throats if necessary. With a stick and a hammer, if needed.

But that’d be uncivil, wouldn’t it?

Almost as uncivil as hoping the IDF strangles the last Hamas terrorist with his own entrails.

PS: you can have my gun when you pry it from my cold head hand.

PPS: Palestinian Arabic is an extraordinarily ugly sounding language.

If you aren’t running on this…

…for the love of all that is holy, please tell me why?

To: The Minnesota Republican Party
From: Mitch Berg, Obstreporous Peasant
Re: Stragegery

Republicans,

Wanna cause a stampede of voters outside the 494/694 loop?

Make this person – Rep. Sandy Feist – the face of the MNDFL.

Her and her pet billl (I’ve added emphasis):

The Minnesota Legislature is considering a bill that would require all public and charter schools to make menstrual products available in school bathrooms, including boys’ bathrooms.

The bill, House File 44, would make it so “A school district or charter school must provide students access to menstrual products at no charge. The products must be available in restrooms used by students in grades 4 to 12.” …

“There are a lot of schools that are moving towards gender-neutral bathrooms, and if we add ‘female,’ we might become obsolete very quickly,” Feist said. 

“Second, not all students who menstruate are female,” Feist continued. “We need to make sure all students have access to these products. There are obviously less non-female menstruating students and therefore their usage will be much lower. That was actually calculated into the cost of this.”

Business output is down 9%. Investment is cratering.

And Sandra Feist’s priority is giving middle-school boys lots of materials for practical jokes.

Sincerely,

That is all.

…that the Venn diagram of people who were dumping on Lauren Boebert’s drunken (and let’s be honest, tacky and ill-advised) make-out last summer…

…and people who are excusing, celebrating and even…uh…

…celebrating a couple of Democrat aides filming gay porn in the US Senate is a circle.

I can’t help but wonder – when he said “I would never disrespect my workplace” – what does he think doing the nasty in the nation’s upper deliberative chamber is? And what would “respect” look like?

Chaser: At least one rumor says Maese-Czeropski’s, uh, film set was Amy Klobuchar’s desk.

Watch out for flying binders!

I wonder if the members of the DFL “coalition”…

…will start to put together for themselves how much of that “alliance” is built on social gaslighting and browbeating by their white, pronouned, “progressive” overseers. (and, naturally, their “leaders” bellying up to the trough for their graft paymetns)?

As predicted by yours truly about this time a year ago, the DFL squandered a $18B “surplus” [1]

The DFL is contratulating itself that it still has a surplus of a couple billion dollars – which is a little like jumping from the top of the IDS building, opening your eyes and seeing the 20th floor, and thinking “Hey, I’m at the 20th floor, I guess I’m OK”.

The DFL has spent the state into debt.

Minnesota passed a humungous budget in the last session. To make that possible, they drew from other funds well outside of general funds, such as special revenue funds and money from the federal government.

For Health and Human Services spending, for example, lawmakers loosened eligibility and working requirements for cash assistance programs. The cost of these changes — which is about $50 million — is currently being funded by federal TANF dollars until the 2027 fiscal year.

And it’s actually much worse than that:

Once the state starts paying for these with state dollars in 2028, spending will go up. And if current events are any indication, the cost of these new changes will likely have blown past $50 million by then.

Additionally, lawmakers also allocated over $2 billion in extra funding to Medicaid. Until 2027, over half of the money will come from the Health Care Access Fund (HCAF) — a special revenue fund that has historically been used for MinnesotaCare. If at any point in the future, HCAF cannot sustain this new Medicaid spending, it will have to be shifted to the general fund.

And, go figure – the economically-illiterate DFL have killed a bunch of the golden geese (aka ripe suck citizens) that usually pay for DFL gigantism:

For one, Minnesota heavily relies on income taxation. But our income tax system is highly progressive. So, the state disproportionately relies on a small portion of the state’s high-earning individuals, which is in itself a problem.

Unfortunately, this problem was made worse last session, when lawmakers passed targeted “tax cuts” that have eliminated or reduced income tax liability for select taxpayers, such as social security income recipients and low-income parents with children. This has narrowed the individual income tax base even further.

And let’s not forget that high-income earners have already been fleeing Minnesota and going to low-tax states like Florida.

The recent changes to the tax system do not just narrow the income tax base, however. According to MCFE, these targeted tax cuts and tax redesigns have substituted less volatile sources of income tax revenue — such as salaries and social security — with the most volatile sources — such as corporate income — putting the state further in a precarious position.

I”m not in on the DFL’s planning, but I suspect it involves reliance on two things:

• Hoping the Biden Administration convincing the Fed to keep interest rates low (through the election, anyway) convinces enough gullible voters that the ecomony is just great, and
• Sending out an endless diet (as it were) of photos of Peggy Flanagan feeding Tim Walz donuts and corn dogs.

After all, that [2] is what got them through 2022.

[1] Which was a bit of a mirage, to be honest – made up of limited-time Federal stimulus money and taxation of economic activity spurred by other government-stimulated spending.

[2] Well, and that whole Roe V.Wade thing, of course.

I was reliably informed that the DFL’s spending spree was going to “reduce poverty by 30%”, and that “Bidenomics” was a new golden age.

And yet…:

Apparently the (checks scorecard) Mainstream Media are now spreading Russian disinformation.

Wonder why Big Left’s noise machine was so quick to try to gundeck The Fall of Minneapolis?

Because they’re smart enough to see that it coud change some minds.

In this case, the minds of academic Glenn Loury and the NYTimes’s John McWhorter – both of whom formerly bought Big Left’s story on the events of May 2020.

And both of whom re-evaluated things pretty radically:

Haven’t seen it yet? Make up your own mind.

This fellow – a Doctor of Intersectional Grievance Studies – is sure nuff gonna show his neighbors what’s what:

Where to start:

• Since Joseph and Mary went to Bethlehem to “be enrolled”, they were pretty much the opposite of “Undocumented”.
• He apparently thinks there’s a significant faction of “southern” Christians who believe Jesus was a European caucasian and that the Holy Land is in Alabama.
• The good Doctor of Intersectional Grievance Studies apparently missed the memo that, if you’re a Christian, Christ came to save everyone regardless of race or much of everything else.

Having spent at least eight years getting a PhD in Intersectional Grievance Studies, it’s understandable he’s not clear on the nuts and bolts of Christian theology – and, being an academic in a field built on fomenting social nastiness, that he’d post a sign and a Tweet so deeply steeped in toxic condescension.

It’s forgivable.

CORRECTION: I’m sorry, I read that wrong. Hef’s not a Doctor of Intersectional Grievance Studies, but rather a PhD in some variety of Theology. He also describes himself as a “Pastor”.

I’m gonna go out on a short, sturdy limb and guess that either he’s the “pastor” of a very sparsely-attended Episcopal parish, or that he’s more of a professor these days.

I’m going to commend you to this particular episode of Ben Shapiro, from a couple weeks ago.

He’s talking about the Republican Candidate debates – comparing the debates Republicans deserve with the one the nation needs.

The one we deserve? Well, the donnybrook between DeSantis and Newsome was a great one. In another time and place, it might have been a classic, like Reagan/Mondale.

But it was just another chapter in this nation’s formerly biennial and now permanent ritual of the tribes ceremonially throwing rhetorical (for now) bricks at each other, immune to any reason the other side may be throwing back.

The debate we need, on the other hand?

It’s a bit of a cartoon – whenever you suggest that maybe it’s time to discuss, even think about, how this nation approaches the subject of perhaps having a “National Divorce”, leftists immediately chant “That was settled in 1865!”.

The only response to that that matters is “Well, no – it was settled in 1776”.

We’ll come back to them.

From the center right, the response is probably more rational, and definitely more frustrating: “we have to preserve the union”.

Why?

If the union’s moral and political compass decays to the point where “the union” has completely trampled on the Constitution, the RIghts of Man and the whole notion of Government being a free association of equals, what is the point?

Put another way – what is more important: The nation’s founding principles, or its political union.

I’ll take founding principles, and ditch the parts of the country that disagree, every time.

There are those on all sides who shy away from the topic, saying any national breakup will inevitably look more like Bosnia or Kosovo or Belfast than some Trulbert-like organic readjustment.

Again – why? If one had asked a typical political thinker in Europe in 1770 what would happen if a people threw off the monarchy and established a constitutional Republic, what do you suppose they’d have predicted?

Chaos. At best.

And given the moral and intellectual midgets who set the standards for our culture, the idea of the “peaceful divorce” just might be harder than it needs to be.

But as Dennis Prager correctly notes, America was less divided in 1861 than it is today. I believe a renewed commitment to federalism is the only hope to maintain a nation.

And a renewed commitment to federalism would require a huge bounce-back resurgence in Federalists in politics. We’re out there – but we’re nowhere near power, even in the GOP.

So our culture is rolling the dice. And the best way to assure that any future, uh, “civic readjustment” is absolutely a bloody debacle is to shame the conversation into the shadows, were only the crazies and the extremists will own, and consider, and be ready, for the split when and if it finally happens.

I’m no expert, but it looks to me that keeping the southern border open is more important to the Biden administration than either Ukraine or Israel.

Again – no expert. But those seem like strange priorities for the American executive branch.

The Governor of Oklahoma has abolished the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion office at all state institutions of higher education:

Let’s roll this snowball.

One the current tropes among the populist right is that “college is useless, and you should send your kids to learn a trade”.

There’s a truck loaded with cinder blocks full of truth in there – for many 18 year olds, a year or two spent learning how to weld, be an electrician or mechanic or tool and die maker would be a much faster path to self-reliance than four years at college racking up debts while learning little or nothing that one needs to succeed in the world.

Now, let’s be clear, here – I don’t think college needs to be a longer more expensive trade school; there can be value to learning a “liberal art”, something traditionally intended to teach one to think rather than strictly to design, build or fix something…

…provided that that that education actually teaches how to think.

We’ll come back to that.

As I’ve noted elsewhere, my father was a great teacher. He taught. high school speech, writing and literature, and college-level education classes. He was one of the two best teachers I ever had. He also used to agree, at least hypothetically, with the likes of Mike Rowe – the ideal education, he said, was spending a few months or years learning a trade, and then going on to some other course of more abstract study after one could pay the bills.

This, of course, may have been a little idealistic projection from a man who, on good day, knew which end of a screwdriver to hit the nail with. He was and remains a brilliant teacher – and one of the least handy people I’ve ever met, myself included.

When I was in high school. and college, I had not the slightest interest in going to trade school – not out of any sense of college being “above it all” or “better” – I was every bit as peripatetic back then as I am today, and if could have squeezed in learning how to machine metal or be an electrician, I would have.

But to my Dad’s point, I also figured I already had a trade; I’d started in radio when I was 15, and had learned a lot. I figured my fallback would be working at some station, somewhere. It wasn’t the dumbest idea, at a time when radio was a tough but viable way to make a living. It’s not advice I’d give a kid today, but that was then.

With the “trade” part figured out? I sought a life living in my head; I majored in English and minored in History and German. I also majored in Computer Science almost long enough to get the minor, but I hated it, and didn’t touch a computer for seven years after I graduated – but that’s another story. And for me, at least, the promise of a “liberal arts” education was fulfilled; I learned how to think, and when the opportunity to jam a bunch of different facets from my background together into a new career fell into my path, I was able to jump on it.

Of course, I’m not sure colleges today teach critical thinking the way Dr. Blake did.

But I come here not to wallow in nostalgia, but to weaponize it.

While I don’t disagree in the least with my Dad, or Mike Rowe, I also think this is a lousy time for conservatives who are so inclined to completely abandon the academy, if only because it’s people from Harvard and Penn and MIT who will write the histories and the textbooks and play an inordinate role in defining our culture…

…and if you see the people who are driving our system toward collapse and calamity today, that should be pretty terrifying. Because just as Califonria-style government followed Californians who fled to Colorado, a society run by the products of our crypto-Maoist university system – the judges, politicians and culture-definers of tomorrow – will follow you into your shop van or plumbing business.

Big Left has been ‘marching through the institutions” for over fifty years; they’re not going to be set back to square one by a season of scrutiny. But it’s an opportunity. And the future of a free society demands that some young conservatives, and the older ones that still control some levers of power (if only their checkbooks) take a shot at that tackle, before the current wave of barbarism completely rewrites the definition of “freedom” for a few more generations.

There was a time when I might have asked what a metro school board, like for example Edina, might have done if a bunch of students wandered around the halls bellowing:\

“Uptown
Downtown
We Just Want Our Lebensraum

Or:

We don’t need ethnic pollution
Bring us the Final Solution!

But it occurs to me…:

…it may be the wrong quesiton these days.

20% of young people believe, to one extent or another, that the Holocaust was a “myth”.

That sounds bad – and it is, but probably not for the reasons that jump out at you.

As Ilya Somin at Volokh points out, part of it is an artifact of the survey question: While 8% of Americans between 18 and 29 “strongly agree” that the Holocaust is just a scary story, 12% indicated they “tended to agree” that it was a myth – which, Somin points out, could many anything from strong doubts down to nit-picking the numbers.

He also points out something that might be even worse: some kids doubts may be due to ignorance:

A second relevant ambiguity is that the question doesn’t distinguish between people who know what the term “Holocaust” refers to and those who don’t. The latter may seem implausible. Who doesn’t know what “Holocaust” means. But much evidence shows widespread public ignorance of basic facts of history, science, politics, and even the basic structure of government. A majority of Americans can’t name the three branches of government, don’t know when the Civil War happened, and support mandatory labeling of food containing DNA (the latter probably because they don’t understand what DNA). And most surveys of political and historical knowledge find that it is inversely correlated with age; that is, younger people tend to know less than older ones. The latter phenomenon isn’t confined to the present generation of young people. Survey researchers found the same thing with previous generations when they were young.

“People in general are ignorant, and young people generally more so” is a pretty common, simple and accurate observation.

The real problem isn’t just ignorance of the Holocaust, so much as complete ignorance of all of Big State’s atrocities over the past century – the Great Leap Forward, the Gulag and the Holocaust:

The point here is not to suggest that ignorance about the Holocaust is unimportant, or that the Great Leap Forward and other similar communist atrocities were necessarily worse than the Holocaust…. I lost several relatives in the Holocaust myself, and have no desire to somehow downgrade its importance.

Rather, the point is that ignorance about the Holocaust is part of a broader pattern. Any solution to the problem probably cannot focus on the Holocaust alone, but must consider the broader issue of historical and political ignorance, as well. For reasons elaborated in my book, Democracy and Political Ignorance, increasing public knowledge of politics and history is likely to prove a much tougher challenge than some imagine it to be. In the meantime, public ignorance about the Holocaust, communist mass murders, and other historical events makes it more likely that we will fail to learn the lessons of these tragic events, and thus be at greater risk of repeating them.

Our society has had a couple of generations of not having to fight against nature or other humans for its very existence. I suspect that that fact alone has caused a degrading of the nation’s aggregate intelligence.

SCENE: Mitch BERG is walking to his parked car after a political event in downtown Saint Paul. As he walks past a near-empty office building, MyLyssa SILBERMAN, Reporter for National Public Radio’s Saint Paul bureau, covering the “Fake News” and “Diversity” beats, steps out.

SILBERMAN: Merg!

BERG: Er, hey, Mylys…

SILBERMAN: In recent years, you’ve pounced on Demcorats for saying “tut, tut, nobody’s coming for your guns…”

BERG: ….and pointing the reams of legislation that shows that they are, but that that’s not good enough unless there’s actually a cop beating down your door.

SILBERMAN: Uh…

BERG: If the cops are busting down one’s neighbor’s door, I should shut up because they’re not storming my house yet. Point being, the progressive line on all outrages against freedom is “If it’s not happening to you right this second, no matter how imminent, then it’s not a threat”.

SILBERMAN: Don’t you think that’s a bit unfair?

BERG: You tell me:

SILBERMAN: Not sure I get your point…

BERG: Yeah, I don’t imagine you do.

AND SCENE

As I’ve been noting for about eight years on this blog, I’m intensely ambivalent about Donald Triump.

His personality roils with traits I personally don’t care for.

But something about all the prosperity, peace and border security is looking good.

“Oh, Merg, so you just want someone who’ll make the trains run on time, yuk yuk”

Peace and security are legitimate jobs of a national government. Prosperity is the opposite of the “Fascist” dynamic you’re yukking about. And Trump at his wackiest didn’t approach the level of authoritarianism of any of Baraclk Obama’s three terms in office.

I’m on Team DeSantis [1],but if it came down to Biden, Harris or Newsom against Trump, I’d probably hold my nose and vote Trump.

The worst thing about Trump is that he, like Obama before him, is the center of a personality cult. And with Trump, soooooo many of the cultists are just so deeply dim:

Loomer – charitably described as “insane” – cites a piece on by David Greenberg, a Rutgers historian who’s never been mistaken for someone who’d throw a life ring to a conservative who fell overboard.

Bill Clinton infamously threw some of his more extreme supporters under the bus in his long forgotten”Sista Soulja” moment (in the the long-forgotten Sista Soulja”). Trump’s never gonna have a “Crazy Laura” moment.

If he did, I might have to hold my nose a little less hard.

[1] And yeah, I think in a just world Doug Burgum would be on the short list, but we don’t live in a just world.

You know those photos that amusement parks snap as you come down to the end of a log flume or roller coaster?

They catch the rider at a moment when they’ve just been waaay up high, and are in the process of falling waaaaay down, into the water (for the log flume) or back to the end of the ride.

If your only frame of reference isd the photo, you have no idea that seconds later, the riders and their “log” are plowing up a plume of water. But seeing as the tracks head inexorably downward, you know where it’s going.

I have to suspect when a DFLer gets those photos, the response is “You’re not in the water right this second…

According to last week’s budget forecast, MInnesota’s DSA-led DFL has led Minnesota from a nearly $18 Billion surplus to…

…well, the snapshot released last week caught the state’s budget at a $2.4B surplus – but, like that log flume photo, it’s that high because that’s when the snapshot was taken on the way down:

Higher estimates in health and human services and education raise total spending in FY 2024-2027, resulting in a negative structural balance in the next biennium.

That “negative structural balance” could be up over $2 Billion. And that’s provided the economy doesn’t really tank.

Who has two thumbs, predicted this, and is currently typing this post? This guy.

Compare and contrast with Iowa:

Iowa led the “tax-cutting wave” in 2022, with the most comprehensive and aggressive tax reform in the United States. This will gradually replace the nine-bracket, progressive income tax with a flat tax, bringing the top rate, which was close to 9 percent, down to a flat 3.9 percent by 2026. Not only will Iowa have eliminated the progressive income tax, it will also have reduced the top tax rate by almost 60 percent.

Iowa’s corporate tax rate, once the highest in the nation at 12 percent, is also being cut: Starting in January 2024, the corporate tax rate will be 7.1 percent, and the rate will continue to be lowered until it reaches a flat 5.5 percent.

Critics of Iowa’s fiscal reforms warn against alleged “economic recklessness.” Mike Owen, deputy director of Common Good Iowa, a progressive think tank, told the Economist that “a crash is coming” and that programs such as education and health care will suffer as a result.

This doesn’t add up. Thanks to fiscal prudence, Iowa’s budget is in strong shape. For the last few years, Iowa’s budget has been in surplus, ending fiscal year 2023 with a $1.83 billion surplus, which was $86.3 million higher than originally estimated. The fiscal year 2024 surplus is projected to be $2.12 billion, rising to $2.99 billion in the fiscal year 2025.

Common Good, like the rest of the non-profit/industrial complex, is getting less official graft out of the state.

No such problem in Minnesota.

Yet.

Here’s the link to the Salvation Army. They need volunteers this time of year, in addition to all the financial needs.

And here’s today’s music:

SCENE. Mitch BERG is leaving a small cafe. Avery LIBRELLE is walking in. BERG is too tired to care and doesn’t try to evade or escape the encounter.

LIBRELLE: Mer…

BERG: Cut to the f***ing chase, Avery.

LIBRELLE: In “One MInnesota! (TM) “, we are all prospering in a future where we boldly stride forward together.

BERG: Can I have some blue cheese dressing for that word salad?

LIBRELLE: You just hate progress.

BERG: Nah. I hate decay and decline. Here’s an example. The entire Grand Palace center, which used to be the heart of a vibrant neighborhood back before “vibrant” meant “graffiti and panhandlers”, is empty with demise of the Pottery barn.

LIBRELLE: And you’re blaming the DFL?

BERG: Who else has defined the business climate in Saint Paul?

LIBRELLE: The wider state economy, duh.

BERG: Which, according to Governors Flanagan and Klinki, is…

LIBRELLE: Going gangbusters for One MInnesota! (TM)

BERG: So Saint Paul’s main commercial strip is languishing because the state’s economy is…too good?

LIBRELLE: Yes. It’s the GOP’s fault.

BERG: A party that has no power in Saint Paul is responsible for a business climate that isn’t really failing…?

LIBRELLE: Yes. That’s why.

BERG: Huh. Maybe if Saint Paul were to identify as a prosperous city, that’ll help.

LIBRELLE: Oh! The city does identify as a prosperous city! And if. you disagree, you’re a MAGA white supremacist1

BERG: Oh, clearly.

And SCENE

Woman defends herself from a “mostly peaceful” attacker:

As someone pointed out in the comments, it’s grimly funny that she had her gun ready to go, but had to dig for her phone.