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 I wrote about here, that means Dayton’s budget wouldn’t come close to balancing. Here’s what the guidelines say about revenue projections:

So how much money would boosting income tax rates actually deliver? According to the revenue department, each tenth-of-a-percent increase would currently bring in an additional $27 million annually, or $54 million each biennium.

Dayton said that he wouldn’t raise taxes more than 3 percentage points, meaning his tax the rich scheme would generate approximately $1,600,000,000 in additional revenue. Dayton also said that he’d raise property taxes on homes valued at more than $1,000,000.

Based on that information, and assuming that Dayton would essentially approve of the spending increases from last session’s budget bills, Dayton’s ‘detailed budget’ would fall at least $3,000,000,000 short of balancing.

It’s time that Minnesotans realized that Dayton’s supposed detailed budget isn’t a budget blueprint. It’s a tax increase. PERIOD. END OF DISCUSSION.

It is, literally, nothing more than throwing money at the deficit.

The Dayton “plan”…:

• Does not solve the deficit: As Gary notes – but Esme Murphy for some reason won’t – Dayton’s budget comes up way short on its promise to “solve the deficit”.
• Shifts the burden to the legislature, which could barely pass a $400 million tax hike in the 2008 session, will not be passing any huge tax increases in the next session, with the likely blood-letting among tax-and-spend DFLers
• Will required Dayton to push the definition of “the rich” well down into the middle class:  if jacking up taxes on couples whose adjusged gross income is $150,000 a year leaves Dayton’s “plan” billions short, how far down will the definition of “rich” have to get pushed?

Here’s the biggest question of all:  Gary Gross asks some excellent questions.

Why the hell didn’t Esme Murphy ask any of this?

The simple fact is this – the media isn’t going to ask Mark Dayton any of the tough questions.

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, roughly $1 billion in taxes goes uncollected each year. During the last biennium, the state revenue agency spent $20.2 million to collect $133.7 million in outstanding taxes, a return rate of $6.60 for every $1 spent. Dayton’s plan counts on collecting an additional $400 million in unpaid taxes by upping the enforcement budget to $60.6 million, theoretically netting the state approximately $340 million.

But financial experts see a problem with that calculation: The rate of return on enforcement activities is almost certain to drop as more tax scofflaws are chased down.

Demko, being a liberal partisan, pays the plan his complients and takes a whack at Emmer as well.  But our bottom lines are pretty much similar:

The bottom line on Dayton’s proposed plan to make the state’s richest residents pay their fair share of taxes? It’s unlikely to result in $4 billion worth of additional revenues for the state.

Now, the DFL’s been howling for months about Emmer’s lack of a “plan”; Demko is no exception:

Even so, financial experts give the DFLer high marks for actually presenting a reasonably detailed plan for solving the looming cash crunch. By contrast, Republican nominee Tom Emmer has yet to provide a credible breakdown of how he’d balance the state’s books, although he’s ruled out tax increases.

Of course, the party out of power doesn’t need a complete plan with perfectly-dotted-I’s and crossed T’s.  They need a vision that convinces people they have a better idea.  The plan matters next February.

Still, Dayton’s not getting quite as smooth a ride as one might expect.

Gary Gross also commented on Demko’s piece.

The reporters who’ve been reflexively characterizing Sen. Dayton’s plan as detailed didn’t do their homework. In fact, I’d argue that serious people couldn’t characterize Sen. Dayton’s submission as a plan, much less a detailed plan.

We’ll keep working on it…

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 within; a drought combined with a depression exacerbated by government reaction to an economic downturn.

The victims?  For all the publicity about stock barons diving off window ledges (mostly apocryphal), the people who suffered the most were the people who had the skin in the game; the farmers and people of the rural midwest.

And as I noted in the first part of this series, the Dayton Dust Bowl – a combination of a deep recession Minnesota didn’t cause, which would be exacerbated and institutionalized by Dayton’s proposed tax policy and spending proposals – would have the same affect; it’d make being a hard-working, middle-class Minnesotan a much more difficult thing.  The “cop and nurse” that the Emmer campaign refers to – the hard-working husband and wife who put in extra hours and scrape and scramble to make over $150K between ’em – will get hammered by new taxes just as they are reeling from the Obama tax hikes next year.

The tax hikes – and their revenue sources – will erase hard-won advances in school choice (charter schools), and make entrepreneurship, especially for the Subchapter S corporations that drive so much job creation, deeply unattractive in Minnesota.

And for what?  A fatter, happier government employee base?

A Teachers Union that can work without fear of competition?

Who else wins?

There was never a chance I was going to vote for Mark Dayton.  After reading this four-page “plan”, I have to wonder – why would anyone with half a brain?

Who’s not a government union employee, anyway?

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 were able to pass in the 2008 session, when they controlled both houses, in a year when the Dems had a huuuuge tailwind, with immense political cost to themselves.

And they want to enact this after passing a tax hike that was ten times as large as the one that they managed in 2008.

With a huge tailwind.

And control of both houses.

Against minimal organized opposition, other than the against-the-ropes GOP.

Simple fact:  Mark Dayton’s entire “plan” is based on the vacuous, vaporous idea that “taxing the rich” – who are largely not “rich” – can by itself balance the budget.  Even under ideal circumstances – meaning “Dayton gets exactly what he proposes” – it can not work.

Dayton will not get exactly what he wants.  Even if the DFL retains control of both chambers – and it likely will not – they can not pass a budget ten times as large as the divisive, controversial budget they passed in 2008; there will still be a huge deficit, while will require an expansion of the defnition of “the rich”.  Which will, in turn, kill more jobs and drive more layoffs and lead to less revenue…

…and it’s a moot point.  Dayton is likely going to lose the House this year; if (heaven forfend) he’s elected, he will face fierce GOP opposition in both chambers, and a populace that’s doesn’t even know how shell-shocked the Obama Tax Hikes are going to gut-shoot it.

So if Dayton is (heaven forfend) elected, the best he can hope for is complete, utter gridlock that will leave the deficit to be dealt with by more fee-juggling and accounting jiggery-pokery, even as Dayton is forced to pay off his chits to his constituents; jacking up union hiring, pouring more money we don’t have into our education system.

Even under the “best” circumstances, the Dayton budget is a complete waste of time.

At worst, it’ll multiply the very problem it’s supposed to “fix”.

This is the Dayton “Plan”.

In a state with a functioning news media, it would be the subject of acerbic fact-checking and  muted ridicule.

Since the only real functional news media in this state is the conservative alternative media, allow me to begin the ridicule right here.

Coming up at 3PM:  That Big Brown Cloud Coming In From The West.

Check out the Dayton Budget “Plan” for yourself!  Find another howler?  Leave it in the comments!

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 pays taxes in Minnesota.

So the State of Minnesota is going to define what a “significant” period of time is. and stake a claim to income, property and other non-user fees during that (undefined) time?

The state treasury should not line up to cash that check just yet.  It’s going to be in court for a while, duking it out over interpretations of the Commerce Clause; let’s not forget the suit over Equal Protection clause issues.

It’s going to be a full-employment program for tax lawyers, and that’s after all the ConLaw people get their cut.

Coming up at 2PM:  What happens when a “plan” is really just a mish-mash of ideas that at best will never be adopted, and at worst will make a bad situation worse?

Check out the Dayton Budget “Plan” for yourself!  Find another howler?  Leave it in the comments!

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 to kill off charter schools.

Oh, he can plausibly claim he’s not “killing” them; merely cutting a piece of their funding that the Star Tribune says is “prone to abuse”.

No, seriously; item 16 in the Dayton Budget proposal says “Reform Charter School Lease Aid Program to eliminate Star Tribune documented abuses. Est. Savings $20 million (out of biennial cost of $85 million).”

Of course, we talked about the validity of the Star Tribune’s “investigation” – Part 1 and Part 2 – and let’s just say it’s thin gruel on which to base policy.

Still, it’s a tiny amount of money in the great scheme of things – but it will pay off a big chit to the Teachers Union.

I wonder if Dayton’s focus-group testing bothered to ask all the African-American, Native American, Somali and Hispanic parents  – who’ve pulled their kids out of their failed public schools to give them a shred of hope, and are charter schools’ biggest proponents – what they think about this?  Not to mention parents like me…

Oh yeah – cuts in lease aid will affect the charters serving poor kids, with not-that-well-to-do parents, the most.  Charters in Stillwater and Eden Prairie with backers with more financial clout will figure out a way – bake sales or construction bonds or something.  But all you Afro-American parents who pulled your kids out of Central High to go to Skills for Tomorrow?

Get back in line and speak only when spoken to!

And I do most sincerely hope the Emmer Campaign is going to do a get-together with charter parents in the inner city before the election.  Have you looked at the percent of students at inner-city charters that are kids of color who are fleeing our wretched failure of a city public school system?

Without lease aid, charter schools will not be able to generate the revenue they need to survive.

Coming up at 1PM:  The Law is what Mark Dayton says it is!

Check out the Dayton Budget “Plan” for yourself!  Find another howler?  Leave it in the comments!

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 wrong for the state to pull the rug out from under the current JOBZ projects.

Check it out yourself!

Didn’t we have a large institution, with printing presses and transmitters, once upon a time to help us keep track of debate inconsistencies?

So let’s try to keep track here; Dayton wants to propose billions in tax hikes that will gut small business and stymie job creation (in the private market), but he wants to gut a program that actually tries to create (private) jobs?

Why, it’s almost as if “private jobs” aren’t an issue at all for Mark Dayton!

Coming up at Noon:  Why does Mark Dayton hate minority families?

Check out the Dayton Budget “Plan” for yourself!  Find another howler?  Leave it in the comments!

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 are used for a variety of things including road and bridge design, computer consulting and even arts instruction at the Perpich Center for the Arts – basically, any skill that the state doesn’t usually keep on its inventory of elite uniononized employees.

Of course, Dayton doesn’t specify which half of state contractors we can live without.  Because most of the contracting is for work that actually needs to get done, by a person who is qualified to do the job.

Need a big, high-traffic bridge built?  The MNDOT doesn’t keep a big bridge design department on staff – because it’s not like the Dept. of Transportation is constantly building new bridges.  You need a bridge designed and built?  Hire a temp – or a “contractor”, as they’re called.

If the state needs to build a new website for vehicle tab info and renewals (hint hint), and they need to make it usable by a multiethnic, polylingual population?  The State of Minnesota doesn’t employ User Experience Architects (that’s what I do), because they don’t need ’em every day; they contract ’em out.

Building a road?  Remodeling a state building?  Transferring data from an old database to a new one? Analyzing the market for a government service? Anything the state doesn’t normally do, day in, day out? They hire “temps”, contractors – construction workers, dry-wall contractors, database analysts, researchers – to do the job.

Democrats endorsed by government employee unions typically go after state contracts because they take jobs away from union members, not because we’re spending too much. Is Dayton planning to actually cut these contracts or does he want government employees to do the work instead?

The simple fact is, shifting contract work to state employees may very well cost more, not less.  At the very least, it’s not a cut, merely a shift (unless Dayton, AFSCME, MAPE and the SEIU really think there are that many underutilized state employees out there…) blowing a $425 million hole in Dayton’s budget plan.

Coming up at 11AM:  Dayton kills tax cuts for (private) job creation!

Check out the Dayton Budget “Plan” for yourself!  Find another howler?  Leave it in the comments!

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 Commissioners and Directors of Communications and Government Relations. So if Dayton gets elected, presumably these state agencies will operate without these important positions.

Commissioners in the Dayton Administration will handle their own communications, take all phone calls from legislators and legislative staff, and run their agencies.

This was a nonsensical proposal from MAPE and should not be taken seriously by a gubernatorial candidate. If Mark Dayton wins, he will fill his new administration with political appointees because that’s what the people expect. They expect his government will be run by people who think like him.

Coming up at 10AM:  Dayton makes more room for his union cronies – on your dime!

Check out the Dayton Budget “Plan” for yourself!  Find another howler?  Leave it in the comments!

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 Fed requires this testing to make sure students are actually learning things at school – a putative goal of education, somewhere down there under ” prevent union teacher layoffs” even in the Minnesota Federation of Teachers’ canon of goals.

A state that doesn’t have an accountability system in place will not receive federal funding.

Now, debate if you will the wisdom of focusing on testing.  I certainly do.

But remember – in the last week in August, the DFL was spitting tacks because Tim Pawlenty “left federal money on the table” for various “health aid” programs.

Now, they’re proposing leaving more federal money on the table – and not a word.

Why?

Other than the fact that that money would hold Education Minnesota accountable for its ongoing failure, I mean?

Coming up at 9AM:  The Incredible Do-It-All Commissioners!

Check out the Dayton Budget “Plan” for yourself!  Find another howler?  Leave it in the comments!

If you are one of the 200,000 Minnesotans with a license from the Minnesota Department of Commerce, prepare for a huge fee increase.

Dayton proposes funding the Commerce Department entirely by fees exacted from those “industries.”

Are you a real estate agent? Reeling from the collapse of the houseing market are you?  Tough rocks, Audrey; your license to do business is going up.

Are you an Appraiser?  Your kids are wearing last years’ shoes, and you’re trying to figure out your umpteenth way to fix spaghetti so the kids don’t twig to the fact you’ve been stretching a two-pound box of noodles, since nobody’s buying houses since the Obama Stimulus ceased stimulating?  Pony up, cowboy.

Youre an Insurance agent? Well, your customers may be in good hands – but unless you cough up a pile of extra money, they’ll be someone else’s hands.

Stock broker?  Notary?  Barber? The list goes on and on.  Basically, if you’re any kind of professional whose franchise to do business depends on a state license, you’re going to be paying more – even if you’re making less.

Coming up at 8AM:  No Child Left Paid-For!

Check out the Dayton Budget “Plan” for yourself!  Find another howler?  Leave it in the comments!

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 that operates in Minnesota.  The plan could literally go bankrupt in the first year.

In the private market, this would be…well, illegal, since regular insurance plans need to have startup reserves.  Since this is a Teachers Union things, it’d basically give Dayton the grounds for another deficit-boosting state bailout.

Meaning more spending.

Meaning more taxes.

Assuming the legislature in a post-Tea-Party, mid-Obamadescenscion era would pony up.

Sound good, teachers?

Coming up at 7AM:  Why Does Dayton Hate Small Business People?

Check out the Dayton Budget “Plan” for yourself!  Find another howler?  Leave it in the comments!

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 people who aren’t wonks, party hacks and political junkies.

Tomorrow on Shot In The Dark, I plan on spending pretty much the entire day focusing on the Dayton Dustbowl.

How badly are Dayton’s budget cuts going to hamper business?

How many (private sector) jobs are they going to destroy?

How much otherwise-useful money are they going to take out of the economy?

How short will they fall at the goal of “closing the deficit?”

How far down will Dayton have to push the definition of “the rich” to actually accomplish his putative goal of “closing the deficit?”

What kind of a Hungarian Clusterhug is Dayton going to present to our next Legislature, if – heaven forfend – he’s elected to office?

Coming tomorrow on Shot In The Dark.

All.  Day.  Long.

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 to pay less taxes.  People react in their own best interests, generally; it’s human nature.  Even DFLers.

That leads, of course, to an ever-expanding game of fiscal cat and mouse; the “rich” – all those cops and teachers and pharmacists and entrepreneurs and mid-level business analysts – work harder and harder to shift money out of taxable status, which causes less revenue to come in, which further drops the revenue projections, which requires the state to further lower the definition of “rich”.

It was, of course, beyond the MPR/HHHI scope to calculate exactly how short the projections will actually fall.  The fact is, Dayton himself thinks one needs a “supercomputer” to figure it out; he hasn’t figured it out either.

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 entitled “Blowing Sunshine Up Minnesota’s Skirt”.

All those fact checkers who’ll be queuing up to go over Tom Emmer plan, which should start coming out in the next week or so, would never allow this type of flip flop (or fumble? We may never know!) to go unnoticed. Why hasn’t Dayton added this important clarification to the budget plan on his website? (PDF file)

And here’s a question: I’m presuming Dayton’s assumptions about revenues were based on the original statement – that it was based on gross income, rather than adjusted income.  How does that change that $4 billion figure that Dayton claims the state will extract from those “rich” cops, nurses, programmers, pharmacists, entrepreneurs…

…and all the other families who have the misfortune to have worked hard and earned a decent living?

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 going up.

We use the term “average” advisedly;  when Margaret Anderson Kelliher asked Mark Dayton why he wanted to raise taxes on a nurse and police officer, Dayton replied that the average nurse and police officer do not make enough money to reach his definition of “rich.”

So above average nurses and cops and anyone else making $130,000 per year – you need to pay your “fair share” to the government.

And by “Fair Share”, that means when you and your spouse – or you alone, if you’re a fairly successful computer programmer or project manager or small-but-hardworking intrepreneur, or a cop that works lots of overtime and security gigs, or a nurse that picks up a bunch of extra hourly shifts – are going to take a big, nasty hit when you creep above that $130K income line.

Whichever one it is.

And that’s on top of all the nasty hits you’re going to get after January 1 from the Feds.

So keep plugging away, Minnesota.   I’m sure the state will appreciate all that hard work.

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 entire New Deal, whose price controls had unintended consequences that rippled through ag markets for generations, as well as land management practices that exacerbated the later Dust Bowl) that kept the Depression going long after it would have healed itself after 1929.

The second was natural – an epic drought.  Either would have been bad enough – and either would have been bearable on its own.  Together, the two sets of circumstances – an unavoidable natural disaster and an avoidable man-made one – combined to create an epic human cataclysm, perhaps the worst in American history other than the Civil War.

Minnesota doesn’t face that exact level of gravity today – but the idea is the same.  Our state faces an epic disaster that’s out of our state government’s direct control – the Great Recession, in whatever form it eventually takes.

And we face the “plan” from one of our candidates for Governor – a man-made disaster that, combined with unavoidable circumstances, will be an epic disaster for Minnesota’s economy.

The Mark Dayton budget plan will, for the Minnesota economy, usher in an epic economic Dust Bowl.

Unlike the Dust Bowl of Steinbeck novels and Guthrie songs, California is sending the problem rather than providing a destination.  The Mark Dayton budget will institutionalize all of the same problems that are gutting the California economy – and that of Greece – right before our eyes.

The media is asking no questions of Mark Dayton about his budget; they’re saving all their energy, apparently, for Emmer’s plan, coming out over the next few weeks.

So it’s up to us.

Starting tomorrow – a long, involved series on Mark Dayton’s “Minnesota Dust Bowl” plan.  I’ll be doing what the media won’t; dissecting the Dayton plan, point by point, piece by piece, and spelling out its impact on you, the citizen.

Load granny on the back of the truck; Shot In The Dark is where all us Okies will be going.