The City of Mound is the kind of place we in places like Saint Paul and Minneapolis  dream about; a town with a conservative city council that has done a great job of controlling spending, weaning itself from “Local Government Aid”, and balancing its budget by being fiscally responsible.

And Sue Jeffers is the kind of person we need more of in Twin Cities conservatism; a fire-breathing conservative activist who doesn’t just talk principle, she acts on it; she may have been the greatest force behind Tom Emmer’s nomination that you never heard of.  While she does do a show on a station that competes with mine (she’s on 100.3, I’m on AM1280) and which Ed and I crush in our time slot (ahem), she’s a friend of mine and one of the sharpest forks in the Minnesota conservative drawer.

But I gotta call her on this one.

Mound city councilman Dave Osmek – who is Republican enough to have been the chief teller at the 2010 MN GOP convention, and conservative enough to talk with Ed and I about the work he helped do to balance the Mound city budget and wean the city off of Local Government Aid – emailed me:

A couple weeks ago, Sue Jeffers’ producer Stan, who lives in Mound, noticed a black Lexus with a City of Mound sign on it. They spent 5-10 minutes bashing Mound (see show podcast from 9/11, hour 2, about 3/4 through the hour).

(Sue’s a good friend, but I’ll let Clear Channel’s promotions department pay me to link to their website, thankewverymuch)

Without calling or checking out the story, the proceeded to blast the Council (4 for 4 conservative Republicans). Jeffers said…they could buy 2 Ford Taursuses for that price…”typical government”…

At face value, it does in fact sound like some pretty wasteful government spending.

There’s more to it, of course:

Except the truth is, the vehicle in question is a private vehicle that we pay milage on for a dock inspector that works seasonally. Instead of buying a $20,000 Taurus, we pay him a couple hundred bucks a season and bought him a magnet for use when on-duty for the side of the car.

So in other words, rather than buying a Lexus, or two Tauri or even a single Taurus, the city of Mound essentially rents a car for about one percent the cost of a Taurus.

Osmek tells me that the story has the conservative Mound city council…

…trying to tamp down this fire, during an election season. Needless to say…I ain’t happy.  I don’t have a problem when people challenge me or tell me when I’m wrong.  But when someone says something this patently false, its incredibly frustrating because lies are far more provacative than the truth.  Like the old saying goes, a Lie can travel across the globe before the Truth gets outta bed.

Naturally.  It’s why it’s such staple of the Alinski-ite campaigning the DFL’s been doing this cycle; inflammation is more useful to them than information.

Making a big noise for responsibility and accountability in government is a good thing.  I strongly encourage it.

But let’s make sure we focus on the real enemies – mainly, those who actually are wasting money!

On the show on Saturday, I talked about how the Dayton “2.0” budget – his second shot at the budget, after his first attempt came up three freaking billion dollars short – was still one freaking billion dollars short.

Someone called off the air asking for proof; I’d gotten into an interview, so couldn’t answer it right away.

But the answer, as a matter of fact, is on the Dayton “Mulligan budget” website, down at the very bottom.

To wit:

TOTAL SPENDING CUTS: $1.213 Billion

TOTAL REVENUE INCREASES & SPENDING CUTS: $4.876 Billion

FORECAST DEFICIT : $5.766 Billion

So do the math; the difference is $890 Million Dollars.

That’s after raising taxes on “the rich” (families making over $150K a year); that’s after a tax hike twelve times the size of the $400 million hike that the DFL-dominated legislature managed to pass by one vote (Tarryl Clark’s!) during a session at the height of Obamamania.

If the media weren’t so busy checking up on Tom Emmer’s landscapers and exactly what percentage of cities he said received Local Government Aid, the people might actually know something about this and…

…oh, wait.  Never mind.

Betty McCollum – Nancy Pelosi’s lapdog:

Hey, Nancy Pelosi’s a consensus-builder!

After four months of demanding “details” from Tom Emmer, and a month of carping about the details that were actually released, Mark Dayton had to…

…um, scrap his first budget and start over.

The second try isn’t a whole lot better than the first.

I’ll do a much more detailed analysis later, but at first blush, Dayton Dustbowl 2.0 isn’t much better than the first.

Some key points:

Shift This: Remember when Democrats, leftybloggers and the media (pardon the redundancy) excoriated Emmer for delaying repayment of “the shift” – the 1.4 billion of education budget pushed to future biennia in the last budget?  And now Dayton would never ever ever do that?  Either do they; Dayton now puts delaying “repayment” on the table.

It’s Racist: We honkies took Minnesota from the Native Americans.  To give them a leg back up, the State of Minnesota has granted them an exclusive franchise on casinos.  Dayton wants to build a “racino” – a casino at the Canterbury Downs racetrack. In addition to breaking the state’s promise – “reparations”, if you will – with the victims of cracker perfidy, it’s likely the proposal to create such a casino would face huge legal and legislative hurdles.  It’s not so much a “plan” as it is “hope”.  Hope is not a plan.  And Dayton banks a lot of money on this.

All Of The Worst Parts Of 1.0 – Still Right There!: It’s still going to jack up income taxes on upper-middle-class wage earners to almost 11 percent.  Not the “rich”, mind you – there’s nary a reference to trust funds anywhere in the budget.  It’s going to send more job creation out of state.  It’s going to send more than a few Minnesota businesses packing for more hospitable states.  It’s going to be a boon to South Dakota.

Some Of The “Savings” Aren’t: Dayton still claims that cutting state contractors will save hundreds of millions.  Of course, much of that work will sooner or later go to state employees, especially unionized ones.  Maybe not in the next biennium (maybe), but certainly the next one.  Today’s “cut” becomes tomorrow’s eternal entitlement.

It’s Still DOA: The legislature, as Phil Krinkie said, will never pass it.  In the last biennium, the legislature could only pass the current budget by one vote – that of Tarryl Clark. This with the DFL in control of two chambers of the Legislature, at the height of Obamamania. The next Legislature, with a chamber likely to flip and with the wind blowing against profligate spending an taxing…

…well, you fill in the blanks.

And finally, It’s Still A Billion Bucks Short: He’s a billion short!  A freaking billion short! A billion!  A million large! What the flamin’ hootie-hoo – a billion!

When will the media admit to the people of Minnesota – Dayton is not ready for prime time.

More – much more – later.

Professor David Schultz says it’s time for the DFL to tag it and bag it as re the Tarryl Clark campaign (I’ll add emphasis):

The poll reports that the lead is unchanged from the previous survey. Since then hundreds of ads and hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars have poured into the race. Yet nothing has changed. If anything, the poll suggests opinions and voting preferences are fixed and with 5% undecided, there is little in terms of swing votes to move.

The race is over. About a week ago I blogged about how Democrats are wasting money on this race and need to stop pouring money into it and shift it to the Third Congressional District (Jim Meffert) or other races across the country.

I’m gonna suggest that Meffert is not going much further, either.  I’m predicting Paulson will win by at least the same margin Bachmann does.  Granted, I’m less connected to the Third District than the Six, but I’m comfortable in saying Meffert shouldn’t start measuring drapes anytime soon, either.

I’m going to blow my own horn for a bit here.

I rock at predictions.

Oh, not always.  I though the ’06 MN Senate race was going to be close; it was not.  I thought McCain was going to make it a closer fight in ’08; I knew Coleman/Franken was going to be a nail-biter, and I was right – I didn’t figure it would turn out quite that way; I blame the Coleman campaign and the MNGOP for that one.

But I nailed the 2002 Senate race – Coleman/Mondale, after Wellstone’s death – almost to the point.  I pegged the 2004 Presidential election almost dead-on; I only missed one of the states.  I got the 2006 Gubernatorial race (albeit not the SOS or Auditors races), the 2006 and 2008 CD6 races, the 2004-2008 CD2 and CD3 races, and a slew of others pretty close to dead-on.  And my finest hour at forecasting; I was 2-3 days off on the execution of Saddam Hussein.

So I’m predicting Emmer wins by 3 points this year.

But that’s not the point of this post.

The DFL, and the left nationwide, want nothing more than to get Michele Bachmann out of office.  Only seeing Sarah Palin murdered would make [some of] them happier.

In fact, you can year the occasional lefty murmering in tones that sound as close as Minnesota Democrats ever get to joy and hope, “I think this is the year teh crazzee woman loses”.

I called this an eight-point race two months ago.  Last month, after DFL-endorsed candidate Tarryl Clark won the primary with a 2-1 margin – against a woman that had dropped out of the race two months earlier – I upped that to ten.

Via Gary Gross at LFR, I see that events are well on track to prove me right.  He quotes the SurveyUSA/KSTP poll:

Today, it’s Bachman 49%, DFL State Senator Tarryl Clark 40%. Compared to an identical SurveyUSA poll released 2 months ago, little has changed: each candidate is up 1 point.

Gross:

Two months ago, the Sorosphere highlighted the fact that Michele wasn’t above 50 percent. At that time, I said that it wasn’t that much under 50 percent and that that poll wasn’t that good of news for Tarryl.

Nine points.

That’s right between 8 and 10.

Not bad.

Just between us, Clark is running a terrible campaign.  I’d say it even if she were the conservative Republican she isn’t; her entire campaign has involved reacting to Bachmann’s jabs.  She’s done a fairly slick, expensive-looking ad poking back at Bachmann’s “Jim The Taxpayer” spots; that’s a lot of money spent reacting to Bachmann, which lets Bachmann set the agenda.  Which is a good thing for Bachmann, but dumb campaigning.  Her latest spot – where Clark, taking a whack at looking like a cover girl (and, truth be told, not doing badly at it; a guy’s gotta be honest), asks Bachmann when she’s going to vote to cut Congressional pay and staff costs.  Not a bad spot, in and of itself, but I’ve yet to see Clark put forward a positive vision for herself in Congress – merely react to and bag on Bachmann.  To be fair, there’s a place for that, and I don’t live in CD6, so I may be missing things.  But from what I’ve seen, even if Michele Bachmann were wildly unpopular (she’s not) and even if this weren’t going to be a great year for fiscal conservatives (it will), it looks to me like Clark’s running a clumsy, inept campaign.

Back when Hugh Hewitt was in town a few weeks back, I was asked to predict the biggest surprise in Minnesota this fall.

My response – while I thought an Emmer win might surprise some people, I thought the best potential was for Randy Demmer to upset Tim Walz.

Finally, the National Republican Congressional Committee agrees:

The National Republican Congressional Committee announced Thursday that they were elevating Walz’s challenger, Republican Randy Demmer, to their “Young Guns” list. For Demmer, it means the national party will provide him with additional support during the final stretch of the campaign.

Young Gun status will put Demmer on the map in GOP fundraising circles, which could be a crucial factor to overcoming his significant cash disadvantage.

It’d be great to win that district back.

The Cook Political Report rates Walz’s district as having an R+1 partisan voting index, but trending “likely Democratic” this fall.

“Randy Demmer has proven that he’s ready to take on incumbent Tim Walz, an out-of-touch Democrat who has blindly supported his party’s failed agenda of job-killing policies and reckless spending,” NRCC Chairman Pete Sessions, R-TX, said in a statement.

Look for a Minnesota Poll shortly showing Walz with a 20 point lead…

If you blinked last Monday, you missed Betty McCollum’s “town hall” meeting.  Indeed, if you sneezed at the wrong time, you may have missed the part where she or any of her staff called it a “town hall”, themselves.

I had a prior engagement – but Doug Bass attended.

Not that it was easy:

I actually didn’t know it was advertised as a “DFL Town Hall Rally” until I got to the event.  But doesn’t the phrase “DFL Town Hall Rally” sound contradictory, oxymoronic?  If they said “DFL Rally,” it would be clearly understood as a partisan event.  If they said “Town Hall Meeting,” I believe it would be generally understood as a non-partisan event.  So the very phrase “DFL Town Hall Rally” sounded odd to me.

As I headed to Macalester, I was thinking to myself “Whose idea was it to have a town hall meeting at 5:30 pm?  There are a lot of people who aren’t going to be able to make it.”  I then realized that this wasn’t a bug, it was a feature, a mechanism of keeping inconvenient people away from the event.

Doug noticed something I did not; I’ll add emphasis:

When I got to Macalester College, one of Teresa Collett’s volunteers saw me, and we started chatting.  He showed me the press release for the event, which was issued on Friday, the traditional day where news goes to be buried. And not just any Friday, mind you, the Friday three days before the event, and the Friday the day before September 11, where the nation’s attention is elsewhere.  The only media outlet that covered the event was Minnesota Public Radio, which let the abovementioned “Town Hall Rally” oddity pass without comment.

And this may be the quote of the day:

I thought to myself “This isn’t a Town Hall Meeting, this is a flash mob!  A secret, moonless midnight flash mob!”

And the conclusion?

This event was a Potemkin Town Hall meeting, an event created for the purpose of being able to claim that a Town Hall meeting took place.  The scheduling, the publicity, the audience made it nothing of the sort.  It was a treachery within further treacheries.

Read the whole thing.

So we had the “flash mob”, and we’ll have two more coming up with friendly audiences – a union hall and another.

That’s a lot of “appearances” for Betty McCollum.

Maybe being in a “D+13” district doesn’t feel as secure as it used to…

(And yes, now would be a perfect time to pitch in a few bucks for to Teresa Collett’s campaign.  The CD2 leadership hates me when I write this, but you live in the Second, where John Kline is going to win by thirty on a bad day, it’d be cool if you could peel off a buck or two for Teresa, who actually seems to have a shot.  And/or for Joel Demos, who’s running the funnest underdog campaign I’ve seen since Harley McClain.  And for that matter for Randy Demmer and Chip Cravaack, both of whom have quietly moved into positions to have decent shots against Walz and Oberstar).

Here’s the part I’ve been looking forward to; Emmer plans to fundmantally reform Local Government Aid:

The Emmer plan calls for reforming Local Government Aid to focus solely on public safety and critical infrastructure needs. Over several decades, LGA expanded to an often politically targeted subsidy for many local governments – in the process paying for non-critical services. An Emmer administration will reform local government aid giving certainty to local units of government as they plan their budgets.

An Emmer Administration will immediately sit down with the League of Minnesota Cities, Coalition of Greater Minnesota Cities and Association of Minnesota Counties to identify mandate reforms that will elevate unnecessary burdens on local units of government.

The Emmer plan calls for reforming Local Government Aid to focus solely on public safety and critical infrastructure needs. Over several decades, LGA expanded to an often politically targeted subsidy for many local governments – in the process paying for non-critical services.

Where do we start on this one?  LGA has become a vehicle to allow local government to launder their spending through the rest of the state’s taxpayers, avoiding accountability with their own taxpayers. Especially the DFL-addled governments of the Twin Cities and Duluth, which get LGA funding 2.5 times greater per capita than the rest of the state.

An Emmer administration will reform local government aid giving certainty to local units of government as they plan their budgets.

It’d add accountability to local governments (which will be spun as “higher property taxes” by DFL-dominated local governments, terrified of the backlash their own citizens might eventually visit on them when they actually have to be responsible for their own spending).

This reform is long, long overdue.

Dayton Says: “Taxing the Rich” will raise four billion dollars.

The MN Department of Revenue says:

This proposal adds a new top bracket at a rate of 10.95% starting in tax year 2011. The 10.95% bracket is set at $150,000 for married joint filers, $75,000 for married separate filers, and $130,000 for single and head of household filers. The new bracket is not adjusted yearly for inflation although the bottom brackets are adjusted for inflation in keeping with current law. The tax year impact is as follows:

And the end result, according to the MNDoR?

Tax Year Impact

______ ($000s)_______

TY 2011 $752,800

TY 2012 $813,600

TY 2013 $879,100

In other words, cranking the tax on “the rich” to a confiscatory 8 to 11% (actually 10.95, but let’s be honest here…) brings in less than half of what the Dayton budget “plan” says it will.

But even that is over triple the tax hike that the completely DFL-dominated Legislature could pass at the height of Obamamania.

Mark Dayton’s budget is DOA.  Electing him – or “Mini-Mark”, Tom Hornery , whose plan is marginally less profligate and, at this point, vastly less-vetted by the in-the-bag media – would be colossal wastes of time.

So according to the media, when then-Saint Paul mayor Randy Kelly – a moderate DFLer – endorsed George W. Bush for President in 2004, DFLers were right – says the media and the DFL – to repudiate him and chase him from public life…

…but today, when Arne Carlson – who endorsed Barack Obama and pointedly remained on the sidelines on Tim Pawlenty – speaks, we Republicans are supposed to bend a knee in reverence?

Especially since he represents exactly the sort of spend til you drop government that we conservatives are fighting against today?  The kind that Barack Obama and Mark Dayton support?

I haven’t figured that one out yet.

(The question came from regular commenter DiscoStoo, although not in exactly this form).

The Twin Cities media continues its ongoing wet tongue kiss of Mark Dayton.  This time, it’s Eric Black at the MinnPost – who sniffs that if you’re of those weirdos that focuses on big principles and visions of limited government getting out of the peoples’ way, then maybe Tom Emmer might be for you.  But…

But  if you value straight talk about what a candidate plans to do, based on facts and logic, DFL guv nominee Mark Dayton demonstrated again today at the Humphrey Institute that he is in a class by himself.

That’s another way of saying, apparently, that he droned on about facts and figures for a long, long time.

He also told the press gaggle in the hallway that he may not release the figures he gets from the Revenue Department on his plan, suggesting that it was getting to be unfair that he is so transparent about his taxing and spending proposals while Emmer continues to be so mysterious.

That’s our Twin Cities media; always looking out to make sure people are “fair” to Mark Dayton.  Whether it’s making sure nobody “unfairly” notes his and his family’s contributions to the PAC that’s been running a three-month smear campaign that gets an “F” for accuracy from “factcheck.org”, to breathlessly parroting Daytons’ whinging about the “unfairness” of the GOP trackers actually holding him accountable for his statements (like saying at yesterday’s debate that cutting state contractors will save over $600 million a year, when his own budget “plan” says it’s more like $425, and even that is misleading).

He told [U of M Poli Sci professor Larry] Jacobs that he won’t raise the whole $4 billion he seeks from the taxes he has specified so far, and during his presentation he told the audience that he is “looking for suggestions” of other revenue-raising ideas that will be consistent with his overall determination to make the state tax system more progressive

In other words, for all the “detail” Dayton offers, he can’t close the budget.  Even his own budget “plan” says he comes up over $600,000,000 short – and that’s assuming that the legislature under a Dayton Administration, likely to be much more conservative than the 2010 class, would pass a tax hike fifteen times as large as the one that passed  by exactly one vote (that of Taryll Clark) in the last session.

So could you please pony up an idea or two, so Eric Black’s narrative can remain undisturbed?

Within an hour or so, Tom Emmer is going to release a plan.  It is going to make the DFLers yak up their skulls, because it will not hold government immune from the vagaries of the economy (which is all Dayton and Horner plan to do).

But I’m fairly confident it’ll provide the answers Dayton’s “plan” fobs off for later.

I had the honor and pleasure of MCing a fundraiser for the District 45 GOP last night, at The Lodge in Robbinsdale.  The Lodge is, by the way, owned by the same people who own “Bill’s Gun Shop”, right next door.  Guns ‘n booze; God  Bless America.

I got to meet SD45 candidate Nick Peterson, HD45A’s Mark Martin and HD45B candidate Reid Johnson.

Full disclosure; I got some appetizers and – this is fun – a $20 Holiday gift certificate!  In all my years of blogging and doing political speeches, this is the very first bit of portable, spendable consideration I have ever gotten.

Watch for the leftyblogs to start writing about the scourge of conservative bloggers getting gas cards.

The appetizers were delicious.

Expect a photo-essay – probably tomorrow.

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!