Category: Dayton Dustbowl
-
The Dayton Dustbowl: The Media’s Code Of Silence
Gary Gross at Let Freedom Ring does the job the Twin Cities media juuuuust can’t seem to get around to (emphasis added by me): During his mini-infomercial with Esme Murphy, Mark Dayton admitted that the highest income tax rate he’d propose would be less than 11 percent. Based on Minnesota Department of Revenue guidelines, which…
-
The Dayton Dustbowl: Blood From A Turnip
Paul Demko, writing for Finance and Commerce, reaches many of the same conclusions that I reached on Tuesday’s series fact-checking the Dayton budget “plan- and comes up with one that I missed : The final plank of the DFLers tax-the-rich proposal involves a crackdown on tax deadbeats. According to the Office of the Legislative Auditor,…
-
The Dayton Dustbowl: Face Down In The Dirt Of This Hard Land
I called this series “The Dayton Dustbowl for couple of reasons. One of them is fairly obvious; raising taxes in a recession is just plain stupid. The other is a little more subtle; the original Dust Bowl on the great plains was a combination of circumstances; some of them out of human control, and well…
-
The Dayton Dust Bowl: Hope Is Not A Strategy
Last but not least, if you are Dayton’s choice for Budget Commissioner, good luck solving the deficit with this plan, especially when the last line in the document is: “That leaves me $635.4 million to go.” Now, bear in mind that 635 million is roughly 1.5 times larger than the immense tax hike the Dems…
-
The Dayton Dust Bowl: “The Law Is What I Say It Is!”
The paragraph in Dayton’s budget plan is a subtle one: 3. Eliminate tax loopholes, such as the one allowing “Snowbirds” to live outside Minnesota for six months and one day of the year, and pay no personal income taxes in this state. I would ensure that anyone who spends a significant amount of time in Minnesota…
-
The Dayton Dust Bowl: “You Have School Choice; You Choose The School We Tell You To!”
Did you pull your kids out of the public school system and put ’em in a charter program? Like I did? Start looking for a new school. If Mark Dayton gets elected and pushes his “budget plan” through, you’ll need to start looking for a new program for your kids. That’s right – Dayton plans…
-
The Dayton Dust Bowl: Jobzed
If you own or are employed by one of the 305 small businesses being helped by the JOBZ program right now, you’ll be out of luck. Dayton’s plan reneges on your agreement and eliminates funding for JOBZ. Of course, during the Almanac debate a few weeks back, Dayton agreed with… Tom Emmer that it’d be…
-
The Dayton Dust Bowl: Take It Out On The Help
If you are benefitting from a professional or technical contract with the state, your funding could be cut. Dayton says we can cut half of the $850 million we spend every two years on state contracts. He may or may not have a point. But you’ll never know it from his budget plan. State contracts…
-
The Dayton Dust Bowl: Lean And Mean?
If you are a potential commissioner in the Dayton administration, prepare to do a lot of work by yourself. Dayton proposes to adopt the Minnesota Association of Professional Employees(MAPE) proposal to eliminate what they call political patronage jobs in the Pawlenty Administration. The MAPE proposal targets Metropolitan Council appointments (does Dayton want them elected?), Deputy…
-
The Dayton Dust Bowl: No Child Left Paid-For
If you are a K-12 student, you will see a $230 million cut in funding for your schools because Dayton plans to eliminate testing. Now, I personally am ambivalent about testing as a goal, an end in and of itself, as happens all too often in our current educational system. But like it or not,…
-
The Dayton Dust Bowl: Killing Off The Sick
If you’re a teacher who happens to get sick in the first year of the Dayton/ Education Minnesota Health Insurance Pool, good luck making a claim. The new Health Insurance Pool that Dayton wants to start for Education Minnesota’s health insurance is, curiously, exempt from the startup balance requirements that affect every other insurance plan…
-
The Dayton Dust Bowl: Dust Bowl Day Marathon!
Today is Labor Day – the day when Union members pat themselves on the back for another year of doing their jobs and getting paid for it, and when the rest of us hit the picnic grounds and ponder buying weatherstripping. And this year, the time when the political season starts to reach out to…
-
The Dayton Dust Bowl: When The Well Goes Dry
The Minnesota Public Radio/Humphrey Institute “Poligraph”feature did provide some thorough fact checking on Dayton’s income tax proposals and found they came up short on revenue. The report called Dayton’s plan to raise $4 billion from raising taxes “wishful thinking”; the plan doesn’t account for the fact that people with money will likely change their behavior…
-
The Dayton Dust Bowl: Grossly Adjusted Waffles
Dayton has changed the rhetoric on his tax plan and now claims the $130,000 for individuals and $150,000 for couples was adjusted income, not gross income. I’m being charitable when I say “change”, by the way – on this blog, I busted Dayton a few weeks back, contradicting his own website, in a piece aptly…
-
The Dayton Dust Bowl: Now We’re All Rich!
If you are an above average nurse and police officer, or a couple of modestly-successful project managers, or an airline mechanic and a school teacher, or a business analyst and a modestly-successful sanitation equipment salesman, or whatever combination of hard-working Minnesotans you can imagine that are making a combined $150,000 a year, your taxes are…
-
The Dayton Dustbowl
Almost eighty years ago, the Great Plains – where I was born, a generation later – were pummeled by back-to-back catastrophes. The first one, the Great Depression, was manmade – a deflating credit bubble whose effects were exacerbated by government intervention in trade (the Smoot-Hawley tariffs, which indirectly crippled farm exports) and the market (the…