As usual, when reviewing the DFL’s claims, the rule of thumb is “distrust but verify; then, resume the distrust”.

So too with DFL House Minority Leader Paul “Mini-Bakk” Thissen’s claims that the GOP budget is “destroying jobs”.   MPR’s “Poligraph” addresses Thissen’s claims.

At least, analyzes the direct claim on its face.  To really analyze it, and the DFL’s entire response to the GOP’s initiative to re-engineer how this state budgets its’ resources the money they divert from the economy, you have to dig a little deeper.

“Last week, the House Higher Ed budget put 1,200 employees at Minnesota’s colleges and universities on notice” he wrote in an April 5, 2010, press release. “The tax bill will slash another 1,700 jobs in counties and cities across Minnesota… With [the state government jobs] bill, the Republican Majority not only hands out an additional 754 pink slips, but also slashes support for private sector job creation.”

Thissen, DFL-Minneapolis, is right that cutting government spending would cost jobs, but his numbers are hard to pin down.

In part because they were never meant to be “pinned down”.  Scare lines are supposed to be nice and vague.

And scare lines are all the DFL really has, this session.

Problem is, Thissen’s scare line isn’t even a good one:

The House version of higher education funding bill would cut about 17.7 percent from the University of Minnesota’s budget and mandate a tuition cap of up to 5 percent. That could mean the loss of 600 to 700 jobs, said Richard Pfutzenreuter who is the Treasurer for the University of Minnesota.

But he points out that those numbers include employees who will retire early and jobs that will remain vacant. Only a fraction will be layoffs, he said. Further, it’s unlikely the university would balance its budget only by cutting jobs, he said. Rather, it will be a mix of trims.

Meanwhile, the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities (MnSCU) budget would be cut nearly 16 percent. As a result, the system is looking at either 554 staff reductions or 490 faculty reductions, including retirements and unfilled positions. That’s about 3 percent of the system’s 19,300 person workforce, according to spokeswoman Melinda Voss.

All told, that’s about 1,200 jobs. But Thissen’s figure is on the high end because it’s unlikely all cuts would come from layoffs. And those figures include retirements and unfilled positions as well.

In other words, Thissen is taking the “worst case” – more on that later – and putting it out there, unvarnished and without context, to disinform the voter.  And MPR is giving the reader the gentlest possible reminder to read beneath the surface.

Thissen’s numbers are based on fact, but he leaves out some important points. For instance, he doesn’t mention that it’s unlikely that the University of Minnesota will cut only jobs to save money, nor does he point out that employment reductions would be made through retirements and hiring freezes, not just layoffs. And his claim on the tax bill relies on just one source–Gov. Mark Dayton.

Given all these caveats, it was a tough call. But overall, Thissen is correct that the spending bills being debated in the House would likely mean government job losses throughout the state.

Right.

Just like cratering revenue means job losses to all of us in the private sector.

And what does the private sector do when this happens?

Not just lay people 0ff (not the smart companies, anyway); if it wants to survive, the business changes the way it does business.

And as much as it may hurt the feelings of some government workers, it’s a fact that there is a difference between the horse that’s pulling the cart and the one that’s sitting in the back cracking the whip.  Government funding exists because the private sector pulls the cart forward. Fewer horses in the cart makes the whole thing easier to pull – and, ideally, means more horses can do the pulling.

Which is something that was, to be fair, outside the scope of the MPR piece – and something Thissen wants to keep you from thinking about.

Tuesday is the special election in SD66.

Greg Copeland is running against former DFL Rep Mary Jo McGuire.

What’s at stake?

If McGuire wins, not much will change; Saint Paul will go from being represented by a whackdoodle liberal to an arguably less whackdoodle liberal.  There’ll be a net/net zero change in the minority caucus.

But some of the things McGuire stands for deserve scrutiny – especially in the wake of the Wisconsin situation.

McGuire introduced a bill that would have made state judgeships appointed, rather than elected, positions:

McGuire was Chief Author in 1997 of HF 1077 which  Proposed  a Constitutional Amendment Requiring that ALL Minnesota Judges To Be APPOINTED by the Governor!

Why is this a bad thing?

Of course, if you’re worried about special interests dominating judicial elections, the OSI/JAS alternative is even worse. That’s because state bar associations and legal groups are dominated by trial lawyers. Lawyers and law firms are the seventh biggest political donors of “all time,” according to Opensecrets.org, and dominate state politics in parts of the country.

The judicial system should maintain a necessary degree of impartiality, but America’s founders certainly didn’t intend for judges to be unmoored from democracy. About 95 percent of America’s civil disputes end up in state courts. That’s an enormous amount of power, which needs checks and balances. There’s a reason why 87 percent of America’s judges are elected.

There are so many reasons to vote for Copeland next Tuesday; he opposes the Central Corridor (even now!) and public taxes for the Vikings; he’ll push for a $10K/jerb tax credit, and advocate a two year property tax freeze.

But perhaps the best reason is that the DFL elite, which treat Saint Paul like they do all of their other special interests – as a milk cow for votes and support – deserves the setback.  They think they own Saint Paul – it’s their own words.  This sort of arrogance shouldn’t be rewarded.

So please help Greg out.  Money’s good (donations page), although it’s getting late for that.  What the campaign needs right now – today through the election – is volunteers.  Volunteers on the phone bank, and out door-knocking.  If you can spare an hour or two, please check in.

Every campaign says they can win.  Every campaign must believe it on some level, or nobody would try to run at all (as, in some parts of Saint Paul, indeed, no Republican does; we’re working on changing that).

This special election race is going to be a tough one.  But if every Republican turns out, it’s doable.  So if you’re a Republican – or a Democrat who is sick of the way your party is abusing the taxpayer – and you live in SD66…

…please come out on Tuesday.  And if you know someone in SD66 who should be voting, make sure they turn out on Tuesday!

We can do this!

I am, of course, a volunteer on the Copeland campaign.

This just in;  computer errors and, no doubt, Wisconsin Democrat perfidy continue to change the vote totals in from yesterday’s SCOW vote.

Prosser now might be ahead by forty…

The latest vote count in the state Supreme Court race in Winnebago County indicates incumbent David Prosser is leading Assistant Attorney General JoAnne Kloppenburg in votes.

A tally compiled by The Associated Press Wednesday and used by news organizations statewide, including the Journal Sentinel, indicated Kloppenburg was leading the race by 204 votes. Figures on Winnebago County’s website are now different from those collected by the AP.

Winnebago County’s numbers say Prosser received 20,701 votes to Kloppenburg’s 18,887. The AP has 19,991 for Prosser to Kloppenburg’s 18,421.

The new numbers would give Prosser 244 more votes, or a 40-vote lead statewide.

…or maybe 7,000:

After Tuesday night’s Wisconsin Supreme Court election, a computer error in heavily Republican Waukesha County failed to send election results for the entire City of Brookfield to the Associated Press. The error, revealed today, would give incumbent Supreme Court Justice David Prosser a net 7,381 votes against his challenger, attorney Joanne Kloppenburg. On Wednesday, Kloppenburg declared victory after the AP reported she finished the election with a 204-vote lead, out of nearly 1.5 million votes cast.

On election night, AP results showed a turnout of 110,000 voters in Waukesha County — well short of the 180,000 voters that turned out last November, and 42 percent of the county’s total turnout. By comparison, nearly 90 percent of Dane County voters who cast a ballot in November turned out to vote for Kloppenburg.

Prior to the election, Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus was heavily criticized for her decision to keep the county results on an antiquated personal computer, rather than upgrade to a new data system being utilized statewide. Nickolaus cited security concerns for keeping the data herself — yet when she reported the data, it did not include the City of Brookfield, whose residents cast nearly 14,000 votes.

I’ll cop to it: I’m hoping for the 7,000.

I talked with a MN state legislator last night.  It was a Republican from the western suburbs of the Twin Cities, by the way, although not one who is regarded as among the most conservative of the lot (and before anyone asks, it was not Rep. Banaian).

Being somewhat new to having interest in the budget process, I wanted to know more about the “Fiscal Notes” that the Democrats are yapping about.

Is the GOP bypassing them because they are products of Minnesota Management and Budget (MMB), which is a partisan office (its head, Jim Schowalter, was appointed by Gov. Dayton, who can also remove him).

“That’s part of it”, the legislator responded.  But there’s more.

More important than the partisanship is the fact, says the legislator, that MMB’s modeling does not account for savings to be realized by budget changes.  The models they use for calculating costs of budget iteams, in addition to being weighted toward racking up costs, do not (says the legislator) account for the money to be saved by the changes.  For example, MMB’s response to the GOP’s plan to consolidate the state’s Information Technology (IT) operations, in addition to the absurd cost projections (ten people, tens of millions of dollars), ignored the savings the consolidation would cause.

Now – did the savings get ignored because the MMB’s process isn’t designed to find them, or did they get ignored because MMB is run by a Dayton appointee whose employment depends on keeping his boss happy, ergo defeating the GOP?

Distinction without a difference, I say.

So with the news that Pawlenty staffer Ben Foster had been arrested in Ankeny, Iowa yesterday for drunkenly terrorizing a family, our statesmen leapt into action.

John “Kumar” Lesch – the DFL representative from House District 66A,  tweeted:

Nixon hired thugs to invade Democratic headquarters. Pawlenty’s first hire tries to invade your bedroom. Yep, he hasn’t changed. #stribpol

Not sure if “he” is Pawlenty.  Not sure if Lesch is sure if “he” is Pawlenty, for that matter; even by Twitter’s neo-literate standards, the post is indecipherable.  One wonders if Surly Beer was busy lobbying Lesch at the time.

But it’s a statement worthy of Ryan “Harold” Winkler.  A drunken staffer’s idiot pratfall has the same weight as the coverup of the Watergate break-in? (For that matter –  Nixon hired Virgilio González, Bernard Barker, James W. McCord, Jr., Eugenio Martínez, and Frank Sturgis? Hm. Who knew?)  Foster was “trying to invade” anyone’s “bedroom?”

Whew.

Good thing Lesch is just a legislator, and doesn’t have anything to do with affecting peoples’ lives.

UPDATE:  Oops – Lesch is a Ramsey County Prosecutor.

Whooie.

UPDATE 2: Lesch was apparently tweeting on his crackberry from the floor of the House yesterday.  He was being hounded by some GOPers on twitter.  He (in bold) was hounding right back.

Wed 8:58 pm — @davidolson91: @johnlesch sounds like you’re a little off today. Maybe you’re just sad you got your ass kicked by someone named Mary Jo. #personalproblem

Wed 9:01 pm — @RyanLyk: RT @davidolson91: @johnlesch sounds like you’re a little off today. Maybe you’re just sad you got your ass kicked by someone named Mary Jo. #personalproblem

Wed 9:53 pm — @davegoblirsch: @johnlesch What’s with the weird tweets today? You really shouldn’t let that special election loss bring you down.

Thurs 12:01 am — @johnlesch: Top 3 groups tracking MN budget vote in dead of night: (1) GOP bloggers living in mom’s basement (2) cab drivers (3) night watchmen.

[Ah, the old “Mom’s Basement” bit.  That one never gets old.  And Lesch is bagging on the GOP for late-night votes?  He does remember the last session, doesn’t he? – Ed]

Thurs 1:01 am — @davidolson91: RT @davegoblirsch: @johnlesch What’s with the weird tweets today? You really shouldn’t let that special election loss bring you down.

Thurs 1:20 am — @davidolson91: @johnlesch still stings about that loss huh? Wish you could be staying up at the Capitol accomplishing things? #timetomoveon #itsover

Thurs 1:28 am — @johnlesch: @davidolson91 Step 1: check your MN House roster, Step 2: self-administer swirlie, Step 3: give mom goodnight hug. #mouthbreathersanonymous

Thurs 1:34 am — @davidolson91: @johnlesch Whoops, didn’t realize you were actually trying to contribute to making laws. But then again, *making* is a the key word there.

Thurs 1:40 am — @johnlesch: @davidolson91 No, the key words are, “out-of-your-league”. Go to bed junior. You’re not ready to play with the big kids. #savehimfromhimself

It’d be interesting to see what “league” Lesch thought he was in.  I was actually looking forward to offering him equal time on the NARN, had he won the primary…

Thurs 1:45 am — @davidolson91: @johnlesch I wonder how long it took you to understand #twitter? Old farts like you are supposed to shun the new fangled technology? Right?

Thurs 2:02 am — @RyanLyk: @johnlesch funny to see you get so defensive and disrespectful towards @davidolson91 #rolemodel

Thurs 2:41 am — @davidolson91: RT @RyanLyk: @johnlesch funny to see you get so defensive and disrespectful towards @davidolson91 #rolemodel

Thus 8:01 am — @ErikLeist: Rep @johnlesch displayed downright disrespectful behavior last night on twitter while on the house floor http://twitpic.com/4hw9n4 #stribpol

Yeah, having people peck at you on Twitter gets old.  The key to it is to ignore the ones that don’t matter. I do it all the time, in case anyone asks…

They don’t matter – do they?

Last year, around election day, I posted a piece of video from Crow Wing County.  Monty Jensen, a disabled veteran, recounted seeing a group of disabled people being, he alleges, coached through the process of voting (not illegal), and, Jensen claimed, having their ballots filled out for them.  Which is not illegal if it involves assisting a voter with exercising their wishes re their own legal franchise – nobody, least of all Jensen, has ever argued this.

But it is illegal if it’s a case of glorified ballot stuffing – say, if someone “assists” someone who is mentally-incompetent and not legally allowed to vote.

Now, as we saw a while ago, Minnesota law may be a bit ambiguous about how guardianship affects someone’s franchise.

But when we last looked at this story, we met Jim Stene, a resident of the Clark Lake Group Home in Brainerd.   And according to his father, Al Stene, there is nothing ambiguous about the fact that Jim should not be voting.

Now Fox News’ Eric Shawn is on the story – and in the report, it seems there’s nothing ambiguous to Al Stene about his son’s state:

Minnesota resident Jim Stene voted last November — and thought he was casting his ballot for President Gerald Ford.

“He was exploited, plain and simple. He was exploited,” his father, Alan Stene, charges. “This is a moral and ethical issue.”

Jim Stene, 35, suffers from anoxic encephalopathy, severe brain damage caused by a lack of oxygen to the brain. He has lived with the condition since 1987, when, as a 12-year-old boy, he jumped into a river to save the life of his drowning sister, Heather.

Jim Stene’s story is tragic enough.

Stene had spent the last 15 years living in a group home in Brainerd, Minn. He and other residents of the home were taken to the Crow Wing County auditor’s office on Oct. 29 to vote by absentee ballot. Minnesota is among the states that offer early voting by absentee ballot days before Election Day.

In an affidavit, Stene’s father charges that “a voter crime was committed … because James is mentally incompetent and is very coachable.”

He fears his son, and others like him across the country, could be used to swing elections.

“They are a forgotten member of our society, I think, to where people can exploit them because nobody really knows what goes on behind the scenes,” Alan Stene said.

“I felt that he was used as a pawn.”

Shawn reportedly spent quite a bit of time with Jim Stene over a weekend in Brainerd in February.  I’ve added emphasis:

Fox News met Stene at a private residence, with his sister beside him, and asked him about voting. While his words came slowly, he clearly understood the conversation, smiling and trying to do his best to answer. When asked who he voted for, he answered quietly, “Ford.” Gerald Ford? Stene nodded in the affirmative.

He was unable to name the candidates or any current elected officials, and he said a worker at the group home where he lived told him for whom to vote. They didn’t move his hand or mark it for him, he said, “just told me who to vote for.” He “did not have a clue” about the person he voted for. And when asked to identify the current president, he said, “Bush, I think.”

The owner of the chain of group homes where Stene lived denies the charges:

“Did Clark Lake (Group Home), on a whim, decide to take this person and sneak them down to the poll? Absolutely not. It’s so ridiculous, it’s absurd,” [Lynn Peterson, owner of the Clark Lake Group Homes where Stene lived] told Fox News.

“As a provider, what did I do? I gave him a ride to the polls and I gave him a ride home.” Peterson says Stene and several others voted in full view of local county election workers, and he affirmed that he and his staff were supporting the legal right of their residents to cast a ballot, the same as people without disabilities.

“As a provider, my job is to provide assistance to handicapped people if they choose to vote,” said Peterson. “At no time were they to be assisted in how to vote.”

Stene – and Monty Jensen, and his girlfriend – claim otherwise.  Those claims would seem to warrant an investigation…

…which was done, more or less.  The Crow Wing County Sheriff’s department investigated the claims – in a line of questioning that led them to talk with Monty Jensen’s estranged father, with whom Jensen hasn’t spoken in years and who was utterly unconnected to the case, but somehow did not lead them to talk with Monty Jensen’s girlfriend.

[Peterson] added that he thinks a care provider should be “somebody that is going to be an advocate, a strong advocate for the people with a disability that have the ability to participate with the voting process or any other process in the community.”

But Stene’s family disagrees.

“Jim is not capable of making those type of decisions, to know what the candidates are and what the issues are,” his father said. And his sister said she “could not believe this was even an issue” and that he was taken to vote.

As she sat next to her sibling who saved her life, tears welled up.

“I just don’t think that he is competent enough,” she said. “I mean, he is my brother and I love him very, very much, and that’s why I personally go vote.”

She also said she “is glad it has gotten this far because there will be more recognition for other people, and for my brother. He has the right for who he wants to vote for, but I honestly don’t think he could vote.” Peterson says Jim Stene wanted to vote. Stene told Fox News he was not asked if he wanted to vote.

In Minnesota, only a judge can determine if a person is incompetent to vote and take away that right. That has not happened in Stene’s case.

So the question is not “was Stene disenfranchised”; the question is “was he exploited by the staff at his group home?”

Read the rest of Shawn’s story.

As the GOP in the Minnesota Legislature drives toward a budget – and does it a solid month earlier than the Democrats managed it in the past session – the Dems’ latest chanting point is that “the budget doesn’t’ agree with the fiscal notes!”

And it sounds pretty serious…

…oh, who am I kidding.  As much as I’ve followed politics over the years, as of yesterday I had absolutely no idea what a “fiscal note” was.

Lori Sturdevant plays plays chicken and egg with Minnesota’s polarization.

Is Minnesota poltitics “polarized” because there’s a “chasm” between the parties?

Or is it the opposite?

I get that. But it could be that the converse is also true.

My notion: Minnesota Republicans and DFLers are so polarized today because they compromised too infrequently…

I read that bit and thought “maybe she’s onto something.  Maybe Sturdevant will reference the generations of complete obeisance to the DFL’s tax and spend machine, “opposed” by a MNGOP that actively squelched conservatism and gave Minnesota net double-digit budget increases, biennium over biennium, leaving Minnesota overtaxed and overstaffed and leaving Minnesota conservatives with several generations of catch-up to play?

Could it be that Sturdevant has perhaps widened her razor-thin sense of selective context?

…in the past decade.

HELL no!

Too many legislative sessions produced a win-lose result — governor wins, Legislature loses.

The power tools available to a governor who wanted smaller government than the Legislature did made it too convenient for him to have his way.

That’s right; Minnesota is “too partisan” because Republicans, operating within the boundaries of the law, did what they were sent to Saint Paul to do. Just like Democrats – with Sturdevant’s, and most of the rest of the media’s, blessing – when they get sent to Saint Paul.

Majorities change.  But Lori Sturdevant’s DFL cheerleading is truly eternal.

It’s the Minnesota left (and RINO-right)’s favorite club-over-the-head line; “if we don’t [fill in the desired spending proposal], the Twin Cities will become a cold Omaha”.

It’s kind of funny, really, since Omaha is thriving these days.

Steve Berg at the MinnPost takes a whack at analyzing the census data – and doesn’t like what he (and, more to the point, his various sources) see:

At first glance, the 2010 Census results seem satisfying and unremarkable. Only upon further review do they reveal unbalanced patterns of growth and wealth that spell trouble for Minneapolis-St. Paul as the metro economy tries to regain momentum.

The official count placed MSP’s 13-county metro population at 3,278,833, up 10.4 percent from a decade ago. That was enough for the Twin Cities to retain its rank as the nation’s 16th largest metro market. While the region grew 40 percent slower than during the go-go ’90s, it still outpaced the 9.7 percent national rate, and it grew faster than all other Midwestern and Northeastern metros in the top 20.

So far, so good.

But there’s “bad” news – or, as Republicans would see it, “reality” and “a changing market” – along with it:

How the region grew should deeply trouble Minnesota’s political, business and civic leaders. Virtually all growth was on the suburban edge, while the central cities and most inner suburbs lost both population and relative wealth. Not only did the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul fail to gain population, they are now fully 30 percent poorer than the metro region as a whole.

The important questions, of course, are “why?” and “what do we do about it?”

And the answers to both – at least as presented by Berg (no relation) are heavily dependent on ideology.

The Twin Cities metro is at a crossroads.  The suburbs – especially the commerce-heavy south and chock-full-of-business west – are thriving.  The latest census shows the Third and Sixth Congressional districts are booming, while Minneapolis and Saint Paul are stagnant at best – which is good news politically, as the DFL strangleholds on both congressional districts will be diluted, but bad news economically, as the urban areas require more and more life support from the parts of the state that actually work.

So what are the signs?  Is there hope?  Will Minneapolis and Saint Paul bounce back?  Or are they destined to become a cold Flint Michigan?

If you read Berg’s article – drawn from the state’s “urban planning” intelligentsia…:

That’s not a healthy trend. Unless a more balanced growth pattern emerges, one that also includes the metro area’s inner districts, and unless prosperity is shared more broadly, the MSP region will lag behind in competing for the young talent and high-quality jobs needed to keep pace as the economy recovers.

…the signs aren’t good.

More Monday.

Mary Jo McGuire won the SD66 DFL primary last night.

And she won it big – 54-37, in an election that was pretty sharply geographically divided; in a primary battle that was fought out between packs of union and special interest supporters, McGuire, who used to represent part of the area in the Legislature, dominated the tony Como Park and teacher-and-oldster-chocked Midway neighborhoods that make up 66B  with crushing majorities.  Lesch, the incumbent in 66A, also dominated his turf – parts of Wards 5 and 6, on the North End and East Side – but with lower margins.

And so the voters in SD66 have a choice to make; between GOP-endorsed Greg Copeland, a guy who’s actually done something to make government work better, and an Ivy-League special interest-mongering attorney and “Community Organizer” whose entire career screams “Listen to your betters, peasants!”.

I’ll be writing about this choice in the coming week and six days.

Today is the DFL’s primary in Senate District 66.

The DFL declined to hold an endorsing convention this time, choosing to go straight to a primary.  Part of it may have been it was a good way to stir up some publicity for what, for the DFL, is a snoozer of a race.

(Of course, the GOP is running a serious candidate and, less normally, a serious campaign.  But more on that tomorrow).

The candidates are a guy named Marchese who I really don’t know (nor will I need to), former HD66B representative Mary Jo McGuire – who left office something like 16 years ago but has dialed in the “women’s vote”) and current 66A representative John Lesch.

Who to vote for, if you’re a DFLer?  Or perhaps someone who decides to become a DFLer?

Perhaps what you want is a genuine legislative leader?

Andy Post at MDE passes on the House GOP’s debunking of the DFL and media’s (pardon the redundancy) LGA myth list:

-Since 2010, property taxes have grown due to other factors (economic growth, property value increases, school levy increases) by $1.9 billion or around 68%. Between 2000- 2010, statewide Taxable Market Value increased 142%.

We noticed this hasn’t changed one iota last year.

-During the 1990′s LGA was increased and property taxes still increased

-The wealthy absolutely pay their fair share:

The top 20% (those with household incomes over $90,000 per year) pay nearly three-quarters of the income tax while the bottom 20% pay nothing and even get something back.

The top 5% of households (those with household incomes over $183,000 per year) pay about 43% of the income tax.

The top 1% of households (those with household incomes over $430,000 per year) pay about 25% of the income tax.

The good news – if the GOP gets its way?:

-Here’s where the tax cuts would be felt by tax year 2014:

Married couple with 2 dependents:

Income of $50,000 will see a decrease of 11.2%.

Income of $75,000 will see a decrease of 10.1%

Income of $500,000, will see a decrease of 1.7%

Head of household with 1 dependent

Income of $25,000 will see a decrease of 38.1%

Income of $50,000 will see a decrease of 9.9%

Income of $500,000 will see a decrease of 1.2%

Single filer with no dependents

Income of $25,000 will see a decrease of 11.2%

Income of $50,000 will see a decrease of 8%

Income of $75,000 will see a decrease of 6.5%

Income of $500,000 will see a decrease of 0.8%

This was the part I loved; according to a 2003 report from the State Auditor…:

Cities above the median in LGA per capita spend 42 percent more on total current expenditures than those below the median LGA per capita.

Is this because their bills are 42% higher? Or is it because

Cities that received the most LGA per capita had much lower taxes per capita.

Scraaaaatch.

You mean – Local Government Aid merely means everyone else must be Happy To Pay For A Better Minnesota so that people in Minneapolis, St. Paul and Duluth can happy to pay “much less” per capita?

That hardly seems fair…

Cities above the median in LGA per capita spend a greater percentage of resources on non-essential services than cities below the median LGA per capita.

LGA – once intended to help poor rural cities afford the essentials of modern life, like sewage treatment and schools – has become a way for cities to pay for the luxuries, since the rest of the state pays for the necessities.

“GOP cuts transit!” screams the agenda media and the DFL (pardon the nearly-inevitable redundancy).

Well, no.  The GOP is cutting local funding for the Central Corridor, the misbegotten, badly-designed boondoggle that has already started destroying business in Saint Paul:

The bill would prohibit spending $69 million in a special transit fund on light rail, commuter rail and bus rapid transit, which uses dedicated lanes. The money comes from a quarter-cent sales tax imposed on five metro counties for rail and bus rapid transit.

The initiative, which passed the House Transportation Policy and Finance Committee on a mostly partisan vote and was sent to the Ways and Means Committee, underscores the division between some GOP legislators, long critical of rail transit, and DFLers who support such services in Minneapolis and St. Paul.

It seems fairly elementary – when you’re in the middle of a crushing recession and trying to figure out ways not to spend in deficit, you try to find ways to spend less money on nonessentials.

Instead of the $69 million being used over the next two years on rail or bus rapid transit, it would replace $51 million cut from general fund money for regular bus operations.

And a rail line that will gut the business sector in a part of the city that has little enough of one, to build a rail line that will accelerate economic retardation, sounds like a good place to start.

The DFL rhetoric machine has gone from 0-60 on this one; claiming that the bill will raise fares to $4 and kill 500 jobs (and studiously avoiding the bit about replacing the funding with the money slated to be wasted on the Central Corridor).

Look – I don’t oppose rail just to oppose rail.  It’s possible some sort of rail or Bus Rapid Transit line could make economic sense.

But the Central Corridor isn’t it.  It won’t ever be it.  By design, it can not be it.  Kill it.

I caught a bit of DFL Senate Minority Leader Tom Bakk and House Minority Leader Paul Thissen on the Keri Miller show on MPR one morning last week.

First – while I often bag on Miller for painting the toenals of liberal guests on the air, she did stick a few good questions in there.

But I liked this bit here.  Bakk said (paraphrasing closely) “Minnesotans keep saying they’re overtaxed.  It’s just not true“.

He pointed out that since Jesse Ventura’s cuts to the personal income tax back in 1999 and 2000, Minnestoans have “paid less in taxes”.  It’s wrong, of course; business taxes get passed on to Minnesotans as surely as the income tax does.  And if you recall, Ventura, who had to run to the DFL to get any legislative support at all, turned about a third of the surpluses of his first two years into tax cuts; the Legislature – which was dominated by DFLers, including Bakk, at the time – spent the other two thirds on permanent entitlements, laying the groundwork for the endless deficits we currently fight with.

But let’s take Bakk at his word for the moment, and assume that Minnesotans’ tax burdens dropped, and stayed dropped, during the Ventura Administration.

Minnesota also rode out the last two recessions – this one and the 2001 Dot Bomb – better than most of the United States.  Our unemployment rate was, stayed, and is in the lower ten of rates in the US, and was for both recessions.

Just saying – Keri Miller?  Please keep booking Bakk.  He’s a never-ending fount of material.

As the MN GOP gets ready for the push to topple Amy Klobuchar, the question is “who will go for the Senate endorsement?”

Sitting here at the CD4 convention at Jimmy’s in Vadnais Heights, we are getting our answer.

That’s right, Minnesota.  Harold Shudlick is running again!

I was watching the replay of Tuesday’s discussion on Marty Owings’ “Capitol Conversations” show, with Greg Copeland (the GOP-endorsed candidate in the SD66 special election) and Rep. John Lesch, one of three DFL contenders that’ll duke it out in the primary next Tuesday.

Toward the end of the interview, the subject of “what is there left to cut?” from the budget of the City of Saint Paul, Copeland brought up the $300K the city spent on a tiny fleet of electric cars.

Lesch responded “OK, that’s $300 thousand.  What else?”

Copeland, inconveniently, hadn’t brought a budget with  him; Marty had to disentangle that particular discussion.

But it just occurred to me; what a golden opportunity for an across-the-aisle discussion!

Rep. Lesch?  Candidate Copeland?  How about we get together with a copy of the Saint Paul City Budget, and go through it, line item by line item, and justify each one’s existence (or removal)?

This sounds like a fantastic idea!

Rep. Lesch (or whomever wins the DFL endorsement); have your people call Mr. Copeland’s people (note: I am Mr. Copeland’s people).  Let’s get this set up.

What a brilliant idea, Rep. Lesch!

Disclosure: I am a volunteer on Greg Copeland’s campaign staff.

I was out the other night at a local restaurant with my friend Moonbeam Birkenstock, a guy who’s out on the far-left fringe of the DFL.

He’s been having financial trouble.   We got to talking about it.

I suggested the usual stuff – cut back on  nonessential expenses, shop at Aldi instead of the organic section at Kowalski’s, find cheaper phone service, turn off the lights – y’know, the  normal stuff people do to trim the fat around the  house.

He nodded repeatedly as I talked and he ate his dinner.  Then he chimed in.  “I have a better idea.  I’m going to buy a big-screen TV”.

I cut up a cod fritter on my plate.  “Um, a big-screen TV?”

“Yep”, Moonbeam said, beaming.

“Why?”

“Because if we have more stuff, we’ll have more impetus to earn more money to pay for it all!”

“Um, you don’t have the money for that.  I thought we were clear on that…”

“I know”, he said, munching on a piece of deep-fried breadfruit.  “You need to buy it for me”.

I stared at him for a monent, and finished eating without a word.  I wound up picking up the check.  His card wouldn’t go through.  Something about being five billion dollars overdrawn.

———-

The DFL and their messagebloggers are still at it.

“Where are the jobs? Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh? You’ve been in office two months, and you haven’t solved the recession like you promised!”

Jeff Rosenberg at MNPublius is, naturally, one of them:

The MNGOP told us they’d be all about jobs, jobs, jobs. But time and again, they keep proposing cutting jobs and cutting wages for the middle class.

Wow.  Did they pass a law telling employers, in and out of the public sector, to trim their payrolls?  Maybe an across-the-board ban on companies – everyone from Target and Medtronic to the Caribe Bistro on Raymond – from hiring?

Well, no:

Yes, they’re going after public employees again. And although they don’t have the power to mandate this, they want you to know that they’d really like the University of Minnesota to cut its wages too:

The salaries of all employees in the executive branch, the judicial branch, and the legislative branch are decreased by six percent…. The University of Minnesota is strongly encouraged to comply with this section as if it were subject to it.

…Somehow, cutting wages for the middle class is all part of the GOP’s jobs agenda.Once again, I find it mind-boggling that conservatives tell us we need to pay CEOs for performance, but they think everyone else needs a pay cut.

Every time I put off my “Logic For Leftybloggers” series for another month, I read something like this, and think “maybe April really is the month to tee it up again’.

Government employees are not “the middle class”.  Oh, in places like Saint Anthony Park and the Midway, with their block upon block of university employees and teachers and government employees, they might be mistaken for it.  And at the DFL caucuses and conventions and functions that seem to define the parameters of Moonbeam and Jeff’s worlds, they probably correspond pretty closely.

But they’re not.  Most of us in the  middle class, even here in Minnesota (where three of the top five employers are the State, the Fed and the various cities) toil away in the private sector.  We find our own jobs, we save for our own retirements, we cover our own copays.   And when business turns down, we work harder and produce more with less and, sometimes when worse comes to worst, take our skills and start over in different jobs and fields to pay the bills.

And just as regular commenter Terry so concisely asked about pensions “Why should I be required to work until I’m 70 so you can retire at 55”, one might also ask “why must I be pay  more taxes to make your job sacrosanct when I’m scrambling to make ends meet myself?”

Because that’s what Jeff and the DFL are demanding; that we, the private sector, dig deeper to keep the government fat and happy, and just shut the hell up about unemployment, layoffs and our own stress.

I’ll say it again and again and again. How do we get the economy going? Consumer demand. We need money in the hands of the lower and middle classes — the people who will actually spend it. All this shortsighted, petty bill would accomplish is to increase income inequality while depressing our already struggling economy.

Where do we start with this?  It’s wrong on so many levels:

Picking Consumers And Victims:  Jeff is focusing on a smallish sliver of consumers – government employees – and the ideal of propping up consumer spending…by taking money from all of us private-sector consumers!  Just like Moonbeam picking out his big-screen TV on my credit card! Does anyone see anything wrong with this picture?

He Who Forgets History Is Condemned To Repeat It As A DFLer: Did we learn nothing from the mortgage bubble?  If you “create wealth” that has nothing underpinning it, all you get is a bubble; when that bubble deflates, it’ll cause more pain than if it’d never existed.

Creating “consumer spending” by taking money from the private sector – reducing the private sector’s ability to create and maintain jobs, say nothing of “consumer spending” – works, sort of.  Until we in the private sector run out of money, anyway.

The only sustainable way to grow consumer spending is to grow jobs.  And growing government jobs without growing the private sector enough to not only support but justify it – creates yet another bubble, a government spending bubble.  It’s a bubble that’s bursting in Portugal and Greece and Ireland now, and will burst across the EU, and California and Michigan soon, and that strenuous efforts may keep from bursting in New Jersey, and which may yet blow up across the entire US…

…and for which we in Minnesota, right this moment, face a time for choosing.

To: MNGOP Legislative Leadership

From: Mitch Berg, UppityConservative

Re: Vikings Stadiium.

Ladies and Gentlemen:

In case the November 2010 mandate you got wasn’t clear enough, repeat after me.

No public financing for a Vikings Stadium.

Everyone – all together now:

No public financing for a Vikings Stadium.

No public financing for a Vikings Stadium.

No public financing for a Vikings Stadium.

No public financing for a Vikings Stadium.

No public financing for a Vikings Stadium.

No public financing for a Vikings Stadium.

No public financing for a Vikings Stadium.

No public financing for a Vikings Stadium.

No public financing for a Vikings Stadium.

No public financing for a Vikings Stadium.

No public financing for a Vikings Stadium.

No public financing for a Vikings Stadium.

No public financing for a Vikings Stadium.

No public financing for a Vikings Stadium.

Keep repeating it until it sinks in.

We sent you there.  We can send someone else that gets the message.

That is all.

With no majority in either chamber, the DFL has resorted to chanting points.

The first one was “where is the GOP’s budget?  Huh?  Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh?”

Then the GOP released a budget – and demonstrated that the DFL really didn’t have one, since none of them supported Dayton’s budget proposal.

Then, it was “But you said it was going to be call cuts?  Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh?”

That must not have tested well.  The meme died off in a week or so.

The latest?  “The GOP is attacking the cities”.

What they mean, of course, is “cutting Local Government Aid”, the program that started out as a state subsidizing small towns’ infrastructures, and has turned into a state subsidy of urban DFL profligacy.

The governments of Duluth, Saint Paul and Minneapolis have done a great job of inextricably tangling their budgets with the state, to the point where any discussion of reforming LGA is met, I think without any actual considered thought, with “we’re going to lay off firefighters and cops and teachers!”.

Not “we’ll have to cut back on lawn-mowing”.

Or “We’ll have police doing less non-essential stuff”, or “we’ll have to replace unionized staffers with lower-priced help for lower-profile jobs” or “maybe we don’t need to mow the grass in the parks quite as often” or “we can consolidate some summer rec programs” or “maybe spending $25,000 on dadaistic, incomprehensible “traffic calming art”…

…which may or may not “calm” traffic, but certainly had a lot of drivers meandering about holding their heads in mute incomprehension, which probably caused accidents, until all the “art” was stolen”, or “maybe our schools need to spend their resources on teachers, rather than administrators”, or “maybe if we stopped putting half the boys in special ed for being boys, we’d have a lower Special Ed budget” or “maybe we don’t need to bus kids who live half a mile from school; the obese little monsters could stand a good walk”, or “Maybe we don’t need $300,000 worth of politically-correct electric cars”, or “maybe fourth-coldest state capitol in the US doesn’t need three refrigerated ice rinks” or “maybe taking huge swathes of housing off the taxable rolls for “affordable” public housing that just isn’t “affordable”, and serves no purpose but to turn the cities into warehouses for the poor, primarily to create islands of utterly DFL-dependent voters”…

…or much of anything.

None of the above.  Because it’s traditionally been easier to scare people into submission by threatening to lay off cops, firemen and teachers (rather than meter maids, community organizers and administrators).

Attack on the cities?

Pfft.  The rest of the state has been getting attacked by the cities for a generation now.

What you’re seeing isn’t an “attack on the cities”.  It’s the rest of the state standing up to three big bullies.

And like big bullies, they’ll bluster and phumpher and fume and threaten.

And just like anyone who is responding to a bully, the important job is to stand firm, and not letting their bluster sway you.

Over the weekend, the MN House GOP released its new K12 Funding bill.  Tom Scheck at MPR reports:

The bill, released Saturday afternoon, makes a slight reduction in expected growth for K12 schools, but increases the amount of money in the state’s per pupil formula.

“The debate in education this year isn’t going to be about how much we spend,” said Rep. Pat Garofalo, R-Farmington as he compared his bill to Gov. Mark Dayton’s budget plan. “The debate instead will be what we fund and what reforms we make to the system.”

And that’s going to make metro DFLers squeeeeeeaaaaal…

Garofalo finds the extra funding in the per pupil formula by cutting the state aid schools rely on for integration.

And that particular bit got the metro DFLers into high dudgeon.  “It’s pro-segregation”, in many varieties, coursed across Twitter yesterday.

It’s buncombe, of course.  Have you been in a metro-area school lately?  They’re integrated.  And as the bill’s sponsor Pat Garofalo notes, we’ve been spending money on “integration” for a long, long time – and the more we spend, the worse the black-white “achievement gap” grows.   There is some evidence that integration itself exacerbates the achievement gap – which is not an argument for segregation (since if I don’t disclaim it, some lefty will claim it for me);

It also caps state special education funding at current levels, leading many Democrats to allege that it would force local school districts to raise property taxes to meet federal requirements.

To be fair to the DFLers, that’s their answer to everything from financial meltdown to rainy days.

Alternate – and, in this case, correct – solution: push back on the definition of “special ed”.  These days, it covers the things that most of associate with “special education” – teaching kinds with serious physical, mental and emotional handicaps.  It has also grown to cover a lot of politically-correct expediencies;  “special ed” has become a part of the Gender Ghetto in public schools, the place to which teachers shunt kids who zig when they’re told to zag.

And make no mistake – school districts love special ed.  Because while teaching the seriously handicapped is an expensive (and justified) job, school districts also looove shunting kids with “insta-Shrink” diagnoses like ADHD – usually boys – into “special ed”; it jacks up the funding, while barely adjusting the amount of “Services”.  In the worst case, it is a covert funding stream for school districts – one that stigmatizes the inconvenient (usually boys).

Special Ed could use a serious reform.  If this bill starts the discussion, then it’s a big win for everyone.

The DFL’s big response to  this – to pretty much everything the GOP has come up with this session – is that it’s a “war on the city”.   They’re doing it because they’re scared; a lot of their base flaked away in 2010, and there are signs it’s not stopping.

Regardless, Democrats say the bill unfairly targets inner-city schools and schools treating the state’s hardest to teach students.

“If you’re a needy student, you’re a loser in this bill,” said Rep. Mindy Greiling, DFL-Roseville.

It’s untrue, of course; if you’re a needy, inner-city student, you’ve gotten the short end of the stick for a generation.  That’s why you, the inner city parent, have been fleeing the public schools – for parochial, charter, and suburban schools – by the thousands.

The bill would also create a pilot program for low income students in poor performing schools to enroll in private schools at state expense. Greiling says the so-called voucher system would allow the state’s private schools to pick and choose which students to accept leaving the public schools to teach the state’s most challenging students. She says the bill is too aggressive.

“It’s not just rearranging the deck chairs,” Greiling said. “The whole hulk of the ship is tipped over and shaken out and spewed out in a different way. We have a whole new ship and that new ship is taking from school districts that have the greatest needs and spreading it around to other districts, small schools and charter schools.”

Republicans argue the voucher proposal is a pilot program for schools in St. Paul, Minneapolis and Duluth and is aimed at helping close the state’s achievement gap. The bill would also dedicate more money for charter schools and smaller rural schools.

And the DFL is petrified with fear over this; they know that, given an alternative, the parents that care about their kids will take advantage of any lifeboat they can find.

And yes, it will leave inner-city schools with the biggest challenges – the kids whose parents just aren’t paying attention.

The bill – read it’s right here – will help students who need the help.

But it’ll reduce the subsidy the DFL has always given to failing schools, and the union that  made ’em that way.

And that’s gotta scare the crap out of the DFL

Former Governor Pawlenty is making a “big announcement” on Facebook at 2PM Central (3PM Eastern) today.

And you need to “like” his Facebook page to see it…

I think it’ll be to announce he’s taking over as head coach of the Wild.

What do you think it’ll be?

Speed Gibson actually found Lori Sturdevant breaking her usual pattern:

Normally, Minneapolis Star Tribune opinion columnist Lori Strurdevant only questions why we plebians do not accept liberal orthodoxy as she has, not the orthodoxy itself. Today’s column on LGA (Local Government Aid) is a welcome exception, thoughtfully considering what State Representative Linda Runbeck (R-53A, Circle Pines) had to say about LGA. Runbeck chairs the House Property and Local Tax committee. Sturdevant asks:

What if, in 1971, Minnesota had not created local government aid (LGA)?

The column masthead has her answer:

If not for LGA, cities would spend (and have) less.

She based this on interviews with a number of current and former mayors, which made for a good column. She might have asked who has more if the cities have less. But back to the orignal question: what if LGA had never been invented?

For starters, we’d not only have less government – we’d have fewer of them:

Mayor Ness of Alexandia thinks 600 Minnesota cities would have ceased to exist today. That’s about 7 of every 10. But the real problem for most of these cities is declining population, leaving those who remain to support now oversized facilities. You can’t just get everyone to move closer in and unpave the outer ring of streets. LGA has put off their day of reckoning, but cannot save them indefinitely.

That may be one of the reasons North Dakota is faring so well; it hasn’t spent billions trying to save its’ small towns.  It’s been said that in fifty years, North Dakota will have eight cities left (the state’s census gains were out in the oil patch and, turning the “they’re doing well because of the oil!” logic on its’ head, Fargo, which is a good 200 miles from the nearest wellhead.  If you drive across the prairie, down Highway 281 or 200 or US1 or any of the other two-lane roads that bump and grind their way across the steppe,  you run into not a few ghost towns, or towns like Cleveland, just off of I94 between Jamestown and Medina, a town that used to have 200-odd people, a school, and – even when I lived 20 miles away, in the  eighties – the remnants of a little downtown. It’s around 70 people now.

In Minnesota, we’d be pumping state money in to help those towns of 70 pay for infrastructure that they haven’t needed in a generation.

Speed – Rex is is real name, but once you start calling someone “Speed”, it’s very hard to stop – turns toward the conclusion:

So I ask: what problem did LGA really solve? I answer: none. Government is a zero sum game. The money to prop up inefficient service providers must come from the more efficient providers. The irony is that while cities like Bemidji receive LGA, that same program negatively affects their population. Could it be that the only real winners are the really big cities who receive the really big slices of LGA: Minneapolis and St. Paul? Cities contemplated as payers, not payees in the original 1971 law? Cities with lengendary overspending and accountability issues?

That’s the point that the DFL wants to keep obscuring; while the original stated purpose of LGA was to help lower property taxes for cities whose infrastructure needs outstripped the population’s ability to pay – building water treatment plants and police stations and schools in towns that couldn’t afford them, then or now – it has become a subsidy for big, bad, profligate urban DFL mismanagment; the Twin Cities, Duluth and Rochester get twice as much LGA per capita as the rest of the state, and that’s with the “the rest of the state” including the cities housing a third of the population that get no LGA at all.

Let me also ask: what good would it do to double LGA? Would Minneapolis hire more police? Doubtful. Would St. Paul fill potholes faster? Of course not. Would our schools get any better? Health care? Transportation? No, we’d just get yet another load of community development and green energy.

I’m not totally opposed to some form of LGA as I said in my previous post on property tax reform. The economies of scale have shifted significantly. Acres served drive costs as well as population. And the State of Minnesota has no doubt burdened outstate governments with additional paperwork and expensive big city mandates on energy, pollution, and construction. But that LGA must indeed go outstate, not to the Twin Cities, who never did need it.

Well, that’s not quite true.

The Twin Cities engineered a “need” for LGA.  By tying essential services – police, fire and so on – to LGA, they essentially hold their citizens hostage, as far as (the media will let) the citizens know.

The short, perhaps simplistic response to the US Census numbers for Minnesota, which will be driving the upcoming redistricting efforts?  The conservative, GOP-dominated parts of this state are succeeding. The DFL-dominated ones are floundering.

Voters – the ones that can – are voting with their feet.

The longer, more detailed analysis of the same question?

About the same.

Not just in Minnesota.  Southern, Republican sun-belt states are booming; the Democrat rust-belt is atrophying.

Rigorously Republican North Dakota?  Kapow.  And now, it’s not all in the oil.

The lesson is clear.  “Progressivism” equals decay, rot, death.  Conservatism equals vigor, growth, life itself.

That is all.

To: Legislature

From: Mitch Berg, Overburdened Taxpayer

Re: Public Financing for Vikings Stadium.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Not just no, but hell no.

That is all.

Two weeks ago, the DFL in the House and Senate together provided exactly one vote for the Dayton Dustbowl budget.

There was, of course, a theatrical letter from Dayton telling the various DFL caucuses not to vote for at – but there’s more than a little evidence that was sent to cover the fact that hardly any DFLers were going to vote for it anyway.  These things do not happen by accident on Capitol Hill.

Anyway…

Via the sources that he has so many of, Michael Brodkorb (via MDE) has released a copy of the DFL Legislative caucuses’ takes on the budget.

Here you go:

Indeed, so far this session looks like it’s been a three months vacation for the DFL.