Question:  In this economy, with Obama and Dayton’s regulations strangling you, with Minnesota’s and the IRS’ already-high business tax rates on top and Obamacare looming in the near future, please tell us:  will Dayton’s proposal of a one-time $3,000 tax break in 2012 (and half that in 2012) to hire a veteran,unemployed person or recent graduate have a drastic effect – or any real effect at all – on your hiring decisions?

I’d especially like to hear from businesspeople – people who make payroll and do the actual hiring.

With much fanfare from the media and the DFL’s press-release bloggers (most of them), the Dayton Administration released its “jobs plan”.

Call it “porkulus with a side of lefse“.  It’s a dumb plan – and there’s language in here that shows the DFL knows it (emphasis added):

Saint Paul – Governor Mark Dayton and DFL Legislators together today announced a plan that if passed by the legislature, will put thousands of Minnesotans back to work this year.

And there’s the tell.  This “plan” – more below – will come to the legislature bundled with some of the other nonsense Governor Dayton couldn’t get through the GOP-controlled legislature last session.  The legislature will toss it.  The DFL/media (ptr),the Strib editorial board and the chanting point bots will say “The GOP took your jerbs!” in November.

This plan is intended for no more.

To encourage businesses to hire new employees, Governor Dayton and the DFL Legislators propose offering a New Jobs Tax Credit. This would be a one-time $3,000 tax credit to any Minnesota business for each veteran, unemployed worker or recent graduate they hire during calendar year 2012, and a $1,500 credit for each new hire through June 2013. This $35 million program would create over 10,000 new, private-sector jobs this year.

Which is a great way to create a bunch of low-wage temporary jobs.

Business owners, I’d love to hear from you.  $3,000 is better than a kick in the teeth.  But given the other uncertainties in the economy.- Obamacare and the coming tax hikes and all the other regulatory nonsense that’s been pecking you to death and all the rest that’s looming in the next two years, not to mention Minnesota’s already-miserable business taxes  – isn’t it more like whizzing in the wind?

Like- a chanting point?

It’s a sign that the DFL has learned one lesson – sort of.  They’ve learned that “eat the rich”, in and of itself, isn’t a strategy for a session.  They have to put a meaningless veneer of “job creation” on top of it.

Other proposals in the plan include a new bonding bill with details to be announced next week, a proposal that will help Minnesota compete for business expansion through the Minnesota Investment Fund, an expansion of the FastTRAC program to provide career-specific training to prepare adults for the jobs of the future and the creation of the Minnesota Opportunity Grants Pilot Program which will help Minnesotans get the training required for high-demand careers.

Read:  a) Construction jobs for Dayton’s union backers, b) spending to try to convince businesses that the tax climate isn’t so bad, and c/d) more spending that benefits Dayton’s supporters in the education industry, coupled with platitudes, as if government has ever successfully predicted about what anything will be tomorrow. 

Dayton:

“From day one, my top priority has been to get Minnesota working again.

No, Governor Dayton.  With all due respect, from day one,  your priority has been to do what the Alliance for a Better Minnesota, Win Minnesota,and the unions have told you to do.  Last year, they told you to Eat The Rich.  Class warfare bombed.

With that out of the way…

Our jobs plan will help businesses create good jobs for thousands of Minnesotans who are looking for work.

No, it won’t.  It’s of little value alive – at $3K credit is bupkes – but of value as a wedge issue dead. Which is why you have your chanting-point bots yapping so hard about it now.

We need to focus on what we know will work: investing in infrastructure, providing incentives to private sector businesses to create more jobs, and training workers for high-demand careers.

Again with the code words.

Look- if you slash business taxes and cut regulations, the economy improves.  Revenue booms based on economic activity.  Then you build the infrastructure. Then you needn’t worry about training, because companies will train their own workers,on their own dime (although they’re happy to let the state pay for it, too).  That is the only “incentive” you need.

And it’s the one the GOP’s been talking all along.

And it’d hardly do to campaign on that, if you’re the DFL,now – would it?

The important part, of course, is preventing Minnesotans from getting fooled by this Potemkin plan.

Ask yourself, tax code, do you feel lucky? Do ya, punk?

 Rick Perry stabs the tax system in the heart.  But under the plan, is it dead or simply pining for the fjords?

Steve Forbes must feel like he’s stepped into a time machine.

The 1996 & 2000 GOP presidential candidate briefly electrified the denizens of political wonkdom with his conception of a national flat tax to simplify – and eliminate – the current overcomplicated tax code over 15 years ago.  Forbes’ idea of broadening the tax base while reducing the individual tax burden proved a temporary hit – too much of one as most of his 1996 rivals embraced similar policies.  Unfortunately for flat tax advocates, the only candidate who didn’t rush towards the concept was nominee Bob Dole, and since then the tax as languished as more theory than practice despite its success in many former Soviet bloc countries.

That is until now, as Texas Governor Rick Perry has revived the concept, winning Forbes’ praise and liberal scorn.  The headlines have screamed about Perry’s new tax rate of 20%, but in most reports, the lead has been buried:

“The plan starts with giving Americans a choice between a new, flat tax rate of 20 percent or their current income tax rate,” Perry writes. “The new flat tax preserves mortgage interest, charitable and state and local tax exemptions for families earning less than $500,000 annually, and it increases the standard deduction to $12,500 for individuals and dependents.”

 

The plan also drops the corporate tax rate to 20 percent and will temporarily lower the rate to 5.25 percent to promote companies working overseas to move to the U.S. along with implementing a “territorial tax system,” which will  tax in-country income.

 

The plan will eliminate the death tax and end taxes on Social Security, which would help an estimated 17 million Americans receiving benefits today. It would also cut taxes on qualified dividends and long-term capital gains.

The drop in corporate tax rate would put the U.S. as the lowest in the world (among major competitors; there are a number of nations with no corporate taxes).  And with most foreign economies unable or unwilling to respond in-kind with similar corporate tax rate cuts, the U.S. could be looking at an immediate repatriation of up to $1.4 trillion with the addition of a “territorial tax.”  Does that mean an immediate increase in jobs?  Not exactly, but a similar “repatriation holiday” for overseas corporations in 2004 spurred massive investments in capital and employment.

Lost in the corporate tax discussion has been Perry’s proposal to cap federal spending to 18% of GDP, or what would be roughly $2.54 trillion.  That’s under the projected 2012 revenues of $2.627 trillion and significantly under the Obama adminstration’s desired $3.729 trillion of spending.  Perry is obviously expecting that projected $1.4 trillion to soften the blow as increased income would (hopefully) spur GDP growth, raising Perry’s 18% beyond projected 2012 revenue levels.

The chief compliants from the right, much like with Herman Cain’s “999” plan, are that Perry’s flat tax doesn’t go far enough.  Indeed, both leading economic fixes from the GOP field disembowel the current tax system but keep it wrapped together in some fiscal Eraserhead policy nightmare.  Both Cain and Perry’s proposals have foreign models to work from – Cain’s VATesque vision which has hindered Europe; Perry’s opt-out Hong Kong-like system which has worked well despite the complication of individuals being potentially able to switch back-and-forth from flat tax to the current system year to year.

Ultimately, Perry’s flat tax needs to be seen as the beginning of a new policy discussion, rather than as a destination.  A total overhaul of the tax code, while popular in spirit, likely polls poorly when the roughly 47% of Americans who don’t pay federal taxes figure out they might be forced to actually contribute to the system.  As proposed, few Americans will find themselves benefiting from the policy, but I think critics are thinking too short term and too little on the potential corporate effects of the plan.

I’ve asked myself – when I’m not busy lampooning the demonstrations and their overkill media coverage – why are the Twin Cities media covering “Occupy Twin Cities” as lavishly as they are?

FInally, Jason DeRusha from WCCO asks the same question:

Reg Chapman and I were talking in the newsroom last night about how the coverage of the protest itself probably should stop fairly soon. Frankly, the fact that crowds haven’t really mushroomed tells us something about Minnesotans. Perhaps we’re not really the protesting type; perhaps this crowd of protestors doesn’t resonate with the middle class working people who are upset about Wall Street, mortgages, bank fees, etc [Ding ding ding – Ed]; perhaps it’s getting cold.

I think we oughtta run with the “Doesn’t Resonate” bit.

On the NARN show over the weekend, “Swiftee”, my old friend and conservative gadfly to the stars, made a great point when he called in; the Flea Party could have been a mass phenomenon, had it stuck with being for corporate perfidy what the Tea Party was to big government.  Let’s face it; the Tea Party’s roots are in revulsion at the government picking winners and losers and deciding which private enterprises are “too big to fail”.

The Flea Party blew it, of course; what could have been a outlet for a lot of legitimate outrage and concern on the part of Middle America either turned into a “progressive” platform or was never intended to be anything but.  And by “progressive”, I mean the worst side of “progressive”-ism; the groupthink, the chanting, the nods back to the miasma of the early seventies that still make a lot of Americans above the age of 45 queasy.

And from a newsman’s perspective – as I noted in my video from “People’s Plaza” on Saturday – there’s really no there there, if you leave either your barely-covered ideology or the news guy’s natural desire to be there with a camera when the molotov cocktails start flying and the hats and bats come out, or at least something qualifying as news happens. Which, it seems clear, isn’t likely to happen.

But the bigger issue is that the crowd is smallish, and there just isn’t news happening.

Face it – retreaded hippies and SEIU members and college activists chanting and making demands isn’t even dog bites man; it’s dog licks dog.

And in fact, that’s where I’m inspired by [a bit of viewer email he’d gotten]. Because we stop covering the protests or protestors doesn’t mean we stop covering the issue that motivated the original Occupy Wall Street protests in New York City.

What are the economic questions you want answered?

Question – and I’m not trying to be snarky, but I largely stopped watching most mainstream TV news years ago: what economic questions have you (WCCO and the larger media, not DeRusha personally, although the question is aimed at him) covered?

The role of the government intervention in creating the housing bubble?

The role of Obamacare and the administration’s mania for regulation in stalling hiring?

The real effect of three years of people chanting “tax the rich”, with a nudge and a wink and a “this is change you can believe in!” from sitting administrations in DC and Saint Paul, has had on entrepreneurship and expansion?

They’d all be great starts.

If you want that kind of coverage, you need to make your voice heard.

Well, there you go!

That, and tell Esme Murphy to stop painting the toenails of DFL politicians on the air.

Home prices should be flatlining through the rest of the decade,  according to a Risk Managers’ association survey:

 The survey conducted by the Professional Risk Managers’ International Association for FICO, found that 49 percent of respondents do not expect housing prices to rise back to 2007 levels for another nine years. Only 21 percent of respondents said they would.

Home prices are unlikely to recover before 2020 and mortgage defaults will persist for years, says a survey of bank risk managers out Friday.

How’s that bailout working for you, President Obama?

The Obama Administation was proud to stick it to the banks, limiting the transaction fees they could charge.

Now, the banks are sticking back:

Reuters reports that Bank of America next year will start charging $5 a month for customers who use a debit card.

And when one bank seizes on a revenue stream, the others will follow suit:

“Wells Fargo & Co, JPMorgan Chase & Co and SunTrust Banks Inc are already testing or plan to fully roll out monthly debit card fees.”

But is it really due to more government regulation?

Yep:

Recent regulations — such as restrictions on overdraft programs — have cut into banks’ fee income. And thanks to the Wall Street reform law, starting next month banks will collect less revenue from merchants to process debit card transactions.

Banks have responded by raising fees or introducing new ones for services that traditionally have been free.

Since Barack Obama is the smartest president ever, he should be able to answer this simple question: where do you think “free checking accounts” come from?

The free account fairy?

It was an uncanny coincidence – if you assume that leftybloggers operate as independent agents, and why, oh, why would one assume that every one of them, from Daily Kos down through Penigma, takes their chanting points from Media Matters for America just because they’ve all been chanting them not merely in unison but in strict top-down sequence for almost a decade now, after all? – to watch the leftyblogs and leftytweeps all chanting the same basic thing almost simultaneously yesterday.

Leftytweep Chris Shields – a semi-frequent kicktoy in this space – twote yesterday:

@ChrisShields There wouldn’t be a need to tax the rich to create jobs if the rich were actually creating jobs.

Gosh – why would “the rich” – let’s broaden that out to “entrepreneurs”, “job creators” and “business” – not be throwing caution to the winds and creating jobs with gay abandon?

• Skyrocketing regulation: The regulatory environment for business – big and small – is getting downright ugly.   There is no realistic chance it’s going to improve during an Obama administration, or while the Democrats control half of Congress.
• The Obamacare of Damocles: Obamacare is already killing jobs, and it’s three years away from going into effect, so we’ve seen nothing yet.
• Taxes Kill: Obama’s initial round of taxes – aimed at “the rich” who are also the investors who provide capital for investing in new business – put a huge chill on job creation.  His “new” “jobs” “plan” may be worse.  They all lead up to…
• Uncertainty: Nothing is ever certain in business, but managing uncertainty is a key part of a good manager’s job.  And when there’s this much uncertainty – in regulation, expenses and taxes, to say nothing of the markets that are all also affected by the same regulations, taxes and expenses – the prudent response is to cut expenses and wait and see.

I find it fascinating that “progressives” like Mr. Shields think that the response to this is to “tax the rich to create jobs”.

Another “progressive” responded to the above:..

Business fears the future, so they hide under the bed where they clip coupons.

…and, when reminded of the need for prudence…

You remind me of the Vikings, who instead of playing to win, play not to lose. How’s that working out?

Which proves the old conservative adage that when it come to business, liberals are generals in the bedroom and whores on the battlefield.

Joe Doakes of Como Park writes:

Pass This Bill?

Okay, Let’s Do It.  Hey you, Mr. Clerk of the House, what’s the File Number of the President’s jobs bill?  Let’s call it up right now and take a vote.

Huh?  There isn’t a House File number?  Why not?

What do you mean the bill hasn’t been written, yet?  He just called on us to pass it, a dozen times.

The President is going to start writing the jobs bill next week?

Then why in Hell did we have to listen to his speech last night?  Why the hoo-haw about scheduling the speech on the night of the Republican debate, the hysterics about rescheduling it to the night of the Packers game, the wailing about the discourtesy of Republicans not responding to the speech, not even attending, when in the end it turns out the Republicans were right all along – there’s no point in responding, there’s no point in even attending, because there’s NO BILL TO PASS.

This entire episode was empty hot air from an empty suit.  Worse than Carter, which I wouldn’t have believed possible.

Worst.  President.  Ever.

It’s always tempting to run a poll – but a poll with only two options is kinda anticlimactic.

From the facebook page of Gary Miller, who’s at least exercising some of the brilliance of his late, lamented Truth Vs. The Machine blog over there – a response to one of Obama’s questions from last night:

OBAMA: “What kind of country would this be if this chamber had voted down Social Security or Medicare just because it violated some rigid idea about what government could or could not do?” ~President Barack Obama

MILLER: Um, a solvent one? One that abides by the rule of law perhaps?

I think it’s time to give an Obama speech the MST3K treatment…

With the news that organizers of a “Labor Day” parade have disinvited Republican elected officials in Wisconsin….:

Organizers of the Labor Day parade in Wausau say Republican lawmakers aren’t welcome in this year’s event…Council president Randy Radtke says they choose not to invite elected officials who have “openly attacked worker’s rights”…Republican Rep. Sean Duffy’s office received notice from parade organizers this week that no Republicans would be invited to walk in the parade. Duffy’s chief of staff, Brandon Moody, tells WAOW-TV the congressman was hoping differences could be set aside for the family-friendly event.

…I have to wonder – is this the left’s latest Borg-hive meme?  That Labor Day is for people who suck up to “Labor?”

Could be – the meme is popping up in Minnesota, too.  Yesterday, Representative Carly Melin – a former Hamline U law student whom the DFL quickly transplanted from St. Paul to Tony Sertich’s old district up on the Range at the last possible second to run as the DFL’s anointed candidate, but don’t you dare call her a carpetbagger – wrote on Twitter yesterday…:

Will #mnleg GOP members who attacked collective bargaining rights all session be celebrating Labor Day? Do they know the history? #unions

Hm.  So “Labor Day” is not so much for union people, but for people who are compliant with Big Labor’s political agenda?

Perhaps it’s time to abolish the Labor Day holiday.  Stop me if I’m wrong, but national holidays are for the nation – everyone – and not just the glorification of special interest groups.

Look – unlike most DFLers, I’ve been a union member.  And unlike most of them, I know the history of the holiday; Labor Day was passed by Grover Cleveland and Congress in 1894 to assuage unionist anger after a series of violent strikes, at a time when they served a very legitimate purpose in the market – to see that workers were paid, and could work without getting killed or maimed on the job.

Today, organized labor largely exists to inveigle government to keep feeding an undisturbed stream of entitlements to generally well-to-do government employees.

Or if we don’t abolish the holiday, maybe we should change the name.  Call it “You Shall Work ‘Til You’re 70 So We Can Retire At 55” Day.  Or, less pointedly, “Back To School Day”, or “Beginning of Football Season Day”, or maybe a fall equinox party with people dancing around an aluminum pole for all I care.  The point being if the Wisconsin unions and Carly Melin want to use a federal and state holiday to enforce compliance with the unions’ demands, then maybe it shouldn’t be a federal and state holiday at all .

I’d say call it “Entrepreneur Day”, but nobody would get the day off…

A Pennsylvania school district opted to save $15,000 a year via some fairly ingenious thinking:

In Carlisle, Pennsylvania, [cuts to the education budget] meant putting an end to traditional means of cutting grass at two local schools. Instead of lawnmowers, the schools are using sheep:

Rather than spend money on cutting grass, the Carlisle School District has brought in 7 Romney sheep to tend the fields. “They’ve done a good job so far,” says Superintendent John Friend.

The sheep come free of charge, since they belong to the principal of the middle school. Friend estimates that they will save the district about $15,000 this year in mowing costs.

Speaking as a metro resident, this seems like a great idea.  Think of how much money and time metro park and rec districts and public works departments we could save by importing sheep to mow parks, roadsites and other areas we currently have to pay to mow!

Silly?  Maybe.

What’s not so silly is the response:

While the $15,000 saved will barely make a dent in Carlisle’s $2 million budget gap, Pennsylvania could render the draconian education cuts unnecessary if it ended special interest tax breaks benefiting corporations and natural gas companies.

In other words, “don’t bother thinking and getting creative – just raise taxes”.

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes…:

Somali immigrants not doing the jobs Americans won’t do, shutting down the assembly line in the refrigerator factory for prayer during work hours.

What we have here is a failure to assimilate.

From the PiPress piece:

The Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations said Monday that more than a dozen employees of the appliance manufacturer Electrolux in St. Cloud are again being denied proper prayer breaks during the Ramadan fast.

The employees are participating in the latest claim with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, according to the Associated Press…This year, the company reduced the length of the meal break. Muslim employees say they no longer have enough time to break their fast and complete prayers after sunset.

Discrimination?  Well…:

Electrolux responded Monday by saying that, in advance of Ramadan this year, the company proposed three possible revised meal and break schedules and put in place the schedule preferred by the majority of the employees.

“Electrolux seeks to accommodate the religious needs of all of its employees,” the company said in a statement.

I’m seeing a real opportunity here for a Muslim parts subcontractor…

And seriously – I am amazed that refrigerators are still built in the US.

It’s been one of the left’s counter-tacks both in St. Paul and DC this past few months; they get that knowing, smug little curl in their lips (you can see it even if they’re writing on Twitter or a blog) and that semi-animated look that says both “Ooh, I have a chanting point that is just going to Pwn3 you!” and, almost inevitably, they are about to get rhetorically shredded (although they never know that in advance.  Never, ever) and titter “Oh, yeah, GOP?  So where are the jerbs?”

To which one responds “What jobs do you want?  A bunch of government jobs – perhaps those “shovel-ready” “infrastructure” jobs that The One was yapping about two years ago?  Which were at best glorified temp jobs designed to buff up union dues collections, and at worst just more money to be spent after being extorted from the private sector or the private sector’s grandchildren, to help the government pick the desired winners and losers?”

Which generally makes them pause a moment, and repeat “where are the jerbs?”

“You want jobs…er, “jerbs”?  Deregulate large swathes of our economy; the energy sector, for starters, if you wanna make the whole western half of this country and the Gulf Coast perform like North Dakota.  That’d put hundreds of thousands of Americans back to work and, more importantly, do something no government “jerb” has ever done; create new weatlh, make a bigger pie for us all to split”.

The usual response, after a slack-jawed moment or two, is “your ugly”, including the spoken bad punctuation (don’t ask me how, they just do it), but every once in a while you get one who just sits with that vegan deer in the headlights look.

I take pity on them.  “Government can create “jerbs” by deregulating industries”.

“Hah!”, they respond.  “I told you government could create jerbs!”

It’d be a worthwhile trade.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The question I’d like to see asked:

 

If Congress doesn’t reduce spending to less than or equal to realistic revenues, creditor nations will decline to buy more debt and the President will be forced to decide which checks his administration won’t mail.

 

If you were President, which checks would you hold back, and why?

 

The question is merely a hypothetical today. But if the economy doesn’t recover soon . . . well, military planners run war games all the time, trying to anticipate problems and create solutions before we’re facing disaster with only moments to react in panic. Why not politicians?

 

Joe Doakes

Como Park

It’s a tough question.  Tougher still because I’ve been told (haven’t looked it up myself, yet) that we could shut down the entire daily operations of our government – Congress, the SCOTUS, and the entire Executive Branch, including all the Cabinet departments, including Defense and Health and Human Services, and still not attack the deficit; it’s the entitlements. (I need to look that up, obviously).

All the usual conservative suggestion – shutting down the Department of Education, defund NPR, privatize the National Endowment for the Humanities – aren’t even a whiz in the wind.  What we need is to cut entitlements – Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, Obamacare – and cut them radically.

Which means not just cutting spending, but changing the way this nation looks at retirement and health insurance.

OK.  So go to it.  What do we do?

We’ve known it for decades; raising taxes in a recession is stupid, stupid, stupid.

But being a liberal means believing history just doesn’t apply to you:

CME Group Inc. is evaluating whether to move some operations to other states from Chicago to reduce its taxes, but it has not decided on an exact timeline, CEO Craig Donohue said Thursday.

“Our tax situation is untenable,” Donohue told Reuters, noting that CME is taxed more heavily than any of its global competitors. The company is talking with at least three states — Texas, Florida and Tennessee — about relocating some of its business to take advantage of lower tax rates there, Donohue said.

Illinois bucked the trend that New York and (to some extent) Calfornia recognized; that not only do you have to cut spending (because government is out of control) but that taxes inhibit revenue.

Two things that make me think “something’s just not right here”, and warrant some investigation:

• Teenagers asking “so, are you going out Friday night?”
• Liberals citing Reagan.

Lately, there’s been a plague of liberals, in print/blogs/on Twitter, stating without fear of contradiction (because, if you’re a Twin Cities liberal, nobody has ever contradicted you) that “today’s conservatives would never nominate Ronald Reagan”.

It’s a claim based on two dubious premises:

As to the abortion issue – that, again,shows how little the left understands the Tea Party.  Abortion is a key conservative issue – but when the economy is in the tank, it’s not the most important issue facing the Chief Executive.  As Reagan allocated political capital among his key priorities – the economy, defeating communism – his metaphorical “abortion” budget was squeezed down to “using the bully pulpit against the practice”…

…which is pretty much where today’s Tea Partiers are with the issue; mortally opposed, but focused on other things at the moment.

The lesson?  As your liberal friends start parrotting these memes, by all means set ’em straight.

(Closed-circuit to liberal commenters: Go ahead.  Point out that “Reagan legalized abortion in California”.  I dare you)

Remember last year?  While New York and California, where noted conservative tools Andrew Cuomo and Jerry Brown instituted sweeping tax cuts and austere budgets, opted to cut budgets and rein in spending, Illinois swam against the tide, jacked up business taxes in a downright Daytonian orgy of confiscation.

So how’s that going for ’em?

How do you think?

Doug Whitley, president and CEO of the Illinois Chamber of Commerce, says his members aren’t happy with the state’s approach toward businesses.

“Big-name, household-name companies that are long-standing Illinois businesses have begun to rattle the cage and say, you know, this isn’t the best environment,” he says.

The tax hikes were serious and, for companies rattled by the simultaneous collapses of the housing and credit markets, a kick in the corporate teeth:

Construction equipment manufacturer Caterpillar was among the first corporate giants to complain in January, when Illinois raised the corporate income tax rate from 4.8 percent to 7 percent.

The latest complaint comes from an iconic company along the Chicago River: CME Group, the parent of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and Chicago Board of Trade.

CME Group Chairman Terry Duffy spoke to NBC about moving the company’s headquarters out of Illinois.

“All our transactions are taxed in Illinois. Whether they’re coming from Mumbai or some other part of the world, they’re being taxed here in Illinois. That’s absolutely unjust,” he said.

Retail giant Sears is also making noise about leaving, as the tax incentives that kept the company in Illinois almost 25 years ago are set to expire.

And that’s the big companies, like Sears; in Minnesota terms, companies like USBank, that squeedged tax concessions out of the city to stay in Saint Paul while smaller companies decamped en masse for Eagan, Woodbury and Minnetonka.

Some suggest the big-name companies are just posturing to get larger tax breaks, a strategy some smaller employers complain they can’t use.

“There are 372,000 companies operating in Illinois. We cannot afford to give hundred-million-dollar deals to all those companies; it’s inefficient and impractical. What we really need to do is talk about creating a level playing field environment that makes Illinois a magnet,” Whitley says.

The “we can’t give everyone a hundred-million-dollar break” bit is just a dumb strawman – but it leads you to the “level playing field”; cut taxes, and make them low, but fair, across the board.

Y’know – the way Minnesota’s also aren’t.

Last week, we took a look at the Strib op-ed by Roger Hale that supported Governor Dayton’s budget plan, whom the Strib felt it was important to remind you was a former CEO at Tennant Corporation…

…but not that he was a large-scale DFL donor who’d given $110,000 in the last gubernatorial race alone to Alliance for a Better Minnesota, the Dayton-family-supported attack-PAC that launched the most epic sleaze campaign in Minnesota history against Tom Emmer.  That, apparently, the Strib didn’t believe was relevant.

“But what about what he said about business?”, some leftybloggers responded.

Doug Baker, CEO of St. Paul-based Ecolab, responded in the Strib over the weekend.  (Full disclosure:  I worked for Ecolab for four years. A good chunk of my retirement is still in Ecolab stock – and it’s performing better than most of my portfolio at the moment.  Their IT department would give Scott Adams a year worth of material, but it’s a good company – as it happens, 20 times the size of Roger Hale’s Tennant).

And Baker is unimpressed by either Hale or Governor Dayton:

I have two reactions to [Hale’s piece]: First, many in the business community strongly disagree — and second, focusing on revenue generation misses the point and delays action on the more important issue — unsustainable increases in government spending.

It’s no secret that Minnesota always has been a high-tax state. An April 2010 report from the Itasca Project, which highlighted our region’s strengths and weaknesses, identified Minnesota’s uncompetitive tax structure as one of the main barriers to job creation.

Blam.

The “progressives” never, never get that.

My experience, which is shared by the majority of my fellow business leaders in Minnesota, is that personal taxes do matter. It’s an issue that frequently comes up when recruiting people or transferring people to Minnesota.

A majority.

And that’s when it comes to getting talent to come to Ecolab Tower in downtown Saint Paul, or the R&D center in Eagan.   Like most big Minnesota companies, Ecolab has created no manufacturing, distribution or non-sales jobs in Minnesota in years.

Following Gov. Mark Dayton and enacting the second-highest tax rate in the nation would hurt our state.

This is especially true today when state and national borders no longer constrain the movement of labor, capital and intellectual property. In this digital age, people can and do work from anywhere — and they can and will choose to work where they can keep more of their income.

And that’s just speaking of people who work for major corporations.

Ecolab started in the 1920’s, back when the barriers to enter business were very, very low.  The corporation was able to build its business during decades when Minnesota’s taxes were blissfully unintrusive.

How about people starting the next generation of businesses?  The little S-corporations that are the big C-corporations of tomorrow?

They’re moving to Hudson, or Fargo, or Sioux Falls, or Dallas/Fort Worth.

Bring this up to a progressive.  Note that North Dakota is lowering taxes as their revenues boom; they’ll respond “but how many Fortune 500 companies have?”  The response is “that’s a function of population density, but nice try.  Still – how many jobs are those Fortune 500 companies creating in MN?”

The answer: fewer:

There also have been recent headquarters moves that cost Minnesota thousands of jobs — MoneyGram comes to mind — which I strongly believe was motivated more by personal income tax rates than anything else (in my opinion).

But you don’t have to take my word for it. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics, Minnesota employment growth has lagged the U.S. rate for a decade. More than 1,200 small and medium-sized businesses left the state from 1997 to 2008.

Baker gets the real problem – the one Hale glossed right past:

More important than the tax issue, though, is Dayton’s proposed double-digit increase in state spending. The legislative majorities have offered a 6 percent increase in spending over last year’s budget — this includes a substantial increase in spending on both K-12 education and health care.

For any family or anyone who owns a business in this state, a 6 percent increase in revenue would be considered very good news and would be considered a budget they could live with. However, in government-speak, a 6 percent increase is considered a “cut” because it represents less than the government wanted to spend.

Baker notes the same thing I did in shredding Hale last week; back in the seventies, Japan and Germany were getting done with recovering from World War 2. China and India were mired in experiments with various degrees of extreme socialism, and starving and riven with political contortions and very much third world countries.

Back in the sixties and seventies – which is where Dayton’s entire strategy came from, and when Roger Hale was an active CEO – it was a very different world.

Baker gets this:

Raising taxes and double-digit increases in government spending may have been a manageable strategy in the 1980s and 1990s, when our competition for jobs came primarily from Wisconsin and Iowa.

But the reality our state faces today is a very different one.

Our global competitors and the majority of U.S. states — led by a number of prominent Democrat governors — are moving toward lowering taxes, prioritizing government spending and building a more supportive business environment in order to attract jobs.

Minnesota must do the same if we hope to grow jobs in the future and compete in the 21st century.

Baker’s piece utterly shreds Hale.  You can tell it hurt the DFLers who were defending Hale last week.  They’re responding.

With name-calling.

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

If I am funding an agency whose mission is to promote home ownership among low-income clients but a substantial percentage of those clients are losing their homes and thereby ending up worse off than before they started – foreclosed, credit ruined and evicted – at what point should I conclude that the agency is a failure and stop throwing money down the rat-hole?

Joe is referring to the plethora of non-profits whose goal is to promote home ownership among low-income buyers – like this, and this and this.

It’s Economics 101;  you can not make something worth other than what people are naturally willing to pay for it without creating unintended, inevitably bad consequences.

Well, it was Economics 101.  In the era of Obama and Dayton, I think it must have been dropped from the curriculum to make time for GLBT economic sensitivity training.

It’s come to my attention that there are Republicans flirting with a public “Racino” – a state run casino, intended to rack up tax money for the state.

There are so many reasons this is just plain wrong.  I’ll give the Republicans the top ten.  Any one of them should be good enough.

10.  A new tax on the stupid is still a new tax. You were sent to Saint Paul to hold the line on taxes.  That doesn’t mean “find reasons to rationalize them”.

9. Gambling has done such wonderful things for Nevada ‘s deficits, hasn’t it? Seriously.  Panacaeas never works.

8.  Ditto New Jersey. Sheesh. Gimme a break.

7. Guido Greaseaballa and his syndicate thank you. Don’t wanna pay up? F*** you!

6. Giving the state more money is like giving teenagers more booze.

5. Yeah, Biloxi, too. We can be a cold Gulf.

4. How does it help pass the budget? I’m sorry – the DFL says it all the time.  Just thought I’d see how it felt.

3. Gambling addiction?  No action on that bet! It harms Afro-Americans more…

2. We owe the Indians.  We took this state from them. It’s only fair that we give them something in return.  Best of all? It’s not “reparations”; it’s a free-market solutions. Everyone wins.

1. Mark Dayton wants you to support it.  The state’s tribes have been solid DFL supporters for a generation- but that’s fading.  Fast.  It’s falling rapidly toward even.  And Indian gaming has been a huge cash cow for the DFL for a couple decades now. If the GOP can be tied to a Racino, Dayton will veto it immediately, and claim credit with the tribes, turning the spigot back on into the DFL’s coffers.

So – it helps the DFL, and it hurts everyone else.

What’s to like?

…this is how it’s done!

3M had its shareholders meeting yesterday.  Now, you may recall during last year’s Gubernatorial race when Target Corporation donated $150K to “MN Forward”, a pro-business advocacy group.  Notwithstanding the fact that Target is historically among the most gay-friendly companies in one of the most gay-friendly cities in the country, “Alliance for a Better Minnesota” – an astroturf group funded by unions and members, ex-members and friends of the Dayton family – ran an epic toxic sleaze campaign calling Target “anti-gay”, because MN Forward supported Tom Emmer, who had supported a version of the same Marriage Amendment that will likely be on the ballot in 2012.  It was a classic disinformation campaign – a corporate version of “when did you stop beating your wife”.

It didn’t really succeed commercially (Target’s stock tracked pretty closely with other mid-market retailers) or politically.  But it did cow Target into a pusillanimous reaction; the company instituted new controls on their political donations, despite the fact that outside the social media and the lefty echo chamber, the protest was much ado about nothing.

By the opposite token, 3M CEO George Buckley shows how it should be done:

Stockholders sided with 3M’s board and defeated a proposal seeking more accountability on political contributions and another asking the company to reevaluate its position on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s board. The company did not provide vote totals. Both proposals were aimed at 3M’s support of conservative causes, including its $100,000 contribution last year to MN Forward, a group that supported Republican Tom Emmer in the governor’s race.

Buckley knows how to call “astroturf” when he sees it:

“I do compliment Macalester College on having 427 students come and ask questions today,” said Buckley, responding to a question on the first shareholder proposal, co-sponsored by Trillium Asset Management and Walden Asset Management, two Boston-based investment firms.

It was a good-natured exaggeration, although it betrayed a certain weariness on Buckley’s part. About 10 people in the crowd of 400 at St. Paul’s River Centre, including students and faculty members from Macalester and Carleton College, spoke as Walden proxies. In slightly differing ways, they asked Buckley to explain why 3M chose to support Emmer, whose stand against gay rights became a campaign issue. A $150,000 contribution to MN Forward by Target Corp. sparked a store boycott, and the retailer changed its policies on political contributions in February.

As a side issue – how long will the Twin Cities media keep pretending that “Trillium Asset Managment” and “Walden Asset Management” are real companies?   Because they are not.  They are to “investment” what the Minnesota Independent is to “news”; a potemkin front designed more for propaganda than any of its purported stated purposes.

Buckley answered all the questions basically the same way: That 3M doesn’t take social issues into account when deciding which candidates to support and that it had backed Emmer because of his pro-business stance. Buckley also defended 3M’s continued presence on the U.S. Chamber board, something one speaker at the meeting criticized because of the group’s opposition to some environmental protection laws and the health care reform bill. Buckley said staying involved with the Chamber is one way to make 3M’s voice heard in the organization.

So kudos to George Buckley. It’s nice to know we still have some CEOs who can be executives out there…

From the lefty playbook; compare apples to distributor caps, then use the results to give ones’ supporters the sense of victimizaiton that, you hope, will keep them chanting on cue.

So with this bit from the City Pages:

Minnesotans who can’t afford their rent outnumber those who can, according to a new study released today, landing us dead last in a ranking of affordable housing markets in the Midwest.

The statement is…well, just wierd.

Over half of Minnesotans can’t afford rent?

Rent…where?

Which half of Minnesotans?

Don’t worry – the point isn’t about thinking:

The National Low Income Housing Coalition released numbers today showing that Minnesotans need to be making, on average, $15.79 an hour in order to afford a decent two-bedroom apartment. Most of us are not.

Well, yeah – most of “us” do, if by “us” you mean Minnesotans, who according to the Census have a median income of $56955 a year.

That’s only part of it, of course:

• For 2-person families, it’s $ 61,457.  That’s about $30 an hour (our two incomes at $15-ish per hour)
• for 3-person families, $74,371 – AKA $37 an hour (or two incomes at $18.50)
• 4-person families’ median incomes in Minnesota are $86,099.
• 5-person families average 83,143 – if you’re following along with the math, that’s like $42/hour, or two incomes at around $21.  But there we’re getting into three-bedroom apartment material.

Maybe by “us” the author, Jessica Lussenhop, means 20-something freelance “writers” who are trying to eke out a living at the City Pages.

The study considers paying up to 30 percent of one’s income on rent to be “affordable,” and the average fair market rent for a two-bedroom apartment is $821 a month. The number crunchers figured you need to make $15.79 an hour to make that work, but the mean wage in the state is only $11.61. That means about 55 percent of us are paying more than we can afford on rent.

If “55 percent of us” are living alone on $11 an hour in a two bedroom apartment, then 55 percent of us are too dumb to be living on their own for long.

You’re you’re working for $11 an  hour, how about moving into a one-bedroom place?  Or getting a roommate ($22 an hour between you; plenty of money for that fabled two-bedroom apartment)?

In the metro area, the average rent skews higher for a two-bedroom–about $924 a month–and vacancy rates are at an all-time low of 3 percent. But the least affordable counties in the state are Winona and Aitkin Counties, and the problem is worst in the greater state.

“Rents tend to be cheaper, but there’s a real shortage of good affordable rental housing,” says Minnesota Housing Partnership researcher Leigh Rosenberg.

Their “data“

The goal of the study, of course, is to create the impression that the average Minnesotan can’t afford to live in Minneosota – presumably without government subsidies.

McDonalds’ hiring spree yesterday had many, many thousands of takers.  Mac’s planned to hire 50,000 people yesterday:

McDonald’s didn’t have a complete count on how many applicants showed up Tuesday, but so many arrived on some local McDonald’s doorsteps that restaurant owners were nearly overwhelmed.

“At one point, we had 120 people outside the door, but we were able to get all 120 interviewed,” said Courtney Ristuben at her Citrus Heights location on Sunrise Boulevard and Old Auburn Road [in Sacramento, California].

Halfway through her four-hour afternoon hiring session, from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m., Ristuben and her team had seen 300 job seekers. She anticipated another 300 by dinner time.

The average restaurant nationwide planned on hiring 3-4 new workers.

“We’ve seen 15- and 16-year-olds looking for their first job to people 50, 55 and over, first-time high schoolers to 20 years’ experience looking for anything we have to offer,” Ristuben said.

It’s a sobering sign of the times in Sacramento and across the country.

By all means, let’s jack up taxes!

Now that Mark Dayton has proposed to jack the taxes of Minnesotans making over about $150,000 up to 10.95%, and those who earn over $500,000 to an unprecedented 13.95% – one dollar out of every seven they earn – it seems there’s a little ambiguity on who “the rich” are.

Who are “The Rich?”

Let’s break it down for you.

The Rich Are Not…: DFL uber-donor Vance Opperman, who donates millions to the DFL’s pet causes, and whose income comes largely from dividends and investments.  He’s not rich.

The Rich Are…: The guy who runs the small consulting shop that landed you the IT gig with the company that was hiring.  He and his wife – who does the accounting – might break $200K for the year.  They are “the rich”, in Mark Dayton’s world.  Not Vance Opperman, silly reader.

The Rich Are Not…:  John Cowles, who donated $2.4 million to help start the Guthrie – in 1960, when that was serious money.  Who used to publish the left-leaning Star Tribune, and who ponied up to help found the center-left MinnPost a few years back.  He’s also given tens of thousands of dollars to the various groups that funded the epic, toxic sleaze campaign that helped squeedge Mark Dayton into office.  Cowles, with his money coming from dividends and trusts and all the usual shelters that the super-wealthy can afford?  What, you thought he was “the rich?”  Of course not!

The Rich Are…:  Grandma’s oncologist.  The guy or gal who spent eight years working his or her ass off taking the hard courses in high school and college to get into med school, then more of the same to survive the weeding-out process during four years of education, an internship and three years of brutal residency designed to test his/her mettle for the field, leading to post-doctoral training leading to a board-certification and then a few decades of experience that make him able to  help Grandma to turn her cancer into a harrowing cautionary story rather than an early good-bye to the grandkids.  After all that, the doctor and his/her spouse – a hospital administrator, as luck would have it – earn a little over $500K, of which about $40,000 currently goes to the state of Minnesota.  Since they – not John Cowles – are “rich”, that tab is going to go up to almost $70,000.  Doc and spouse, of course, still have options; that place in Prescott is looking mighty nice right now.   Which Prescott – Wisconsin or Arizona?  I think they’d both love to have an Oncologist for a neighbor, especially since they’re “rich” – don’t you?

The Rich Are Not…:  Mark Dayton, whose net worth is somewhere between $3,000,000 and $12,000,000 (or was, back in 2006, the last time he deigned to report his net worth according to the Minnesota Birkeydependant.  It’s mostly tax-sheltered, of course, off in tax havens like South Dakota or all those other states where people aren’t so Happy To Pay For more government.  Which makes them ideal for trusts, where trust fund babies like The Governor can keep his money!  So even though Governor Dayton has Renoirs to sell to finance his gubernatorial campaign, he’s not The Rich.  Nosirreebob.

The Rich Are…:  You, if you are (to pick an example from my own social circle) a programming consultant who started working as a code jockey right out of college, and spent a decade or so honing your skills as a software enginer.  You write good, tight code; you’ve stayed up on all the advances, and are fluent in not only several programming languages but in many of the arcane architectural environments that seem to so completely tribalize software these days.  You’ve moved on up; from your first job, making $24K a  year as a COBOL programmer for, say, Best Buy back in 1989, you’ve worked your way up to being a pretty indispensible part of some big, business-mission-critical projects.  You’re a hired gun, and a good one, and you get paid pretty well for it;  you bill $85 an hour or so, and work for six-month stretches on high-profile projects.  Tack on the salary from your spouse – a corporate HR benefits administrator who makes about $55K – and that means you make about $$225K on a good year; more during up years, less when the market’s off.  Not enough to have Renoirs to sell, but plenty comfortable.  Good thing, too – you pay for your own retirement, and write your own checks to Medicare and Social Security.  You know better than to complain – but you’re both one layoff or cut contract or downturn away from living on savings until the market turns up again.  Oh, yeah – your state tax bill is going to rise from $17K and change to almost $25,000.  Because you, you greedy bastard?  You are rich!

Unlike Vance Opperman, John Cowles or Mark Dayton.

Hang your head in shame, plutocrat.

CORRECTION – MAYBE: I’ m told that the 13.95% rate only applies to income over $500,000.  It changes the math…

…but not the principle.  “The Rich”, according to Daytons’ budget proposal, are people who earn income, as opposed to the rich, who make their money from capital gains and dividends and can afford to shelter their income in ways “The Rich” usually can’t.

Via David Brauer, I see former governor Arne Carlson has a blog.

Well, don’t get too excited; he’s done four posts so far.  But the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, as they say.

Carlson dislikes being called a “backstabber” in “Politico” for his tireless work against Tim Pawlenty (and of course Tom Emmer) over the past nine years.  Carlson doesn’t like being criticized, naturally; he tells us so.

Now, the Minnesota GOP tossed Carlson, and a bunch of other former GOP officeholders who actively campaigned against Tom Emmer and, by extension, the party’s nascent conservatism, this past election.

Now, Carlson has the right to his opinion.  And he knows it, naturally: he makes no bones about his not liking the current crop of conservative Republicans, including Pawlenty:

It is no secret that I have serious qualms about the candidacy of Governor Pawlenty and do not believe his claims of prudent financial management come anywhere close to the truth. Hence, the scrutiny will continue……….

He even told Politico that he’d go on the road, pay any price and bear any burden to try to keep Pawlenty out of the White House (emphasis added):

“I will go to Iowa and New Hampshire and have press conferences, if it comes to that,” he told POLITICO in an interview. “With Tim Pawlenty, I’m outraged that his record is one of the worst in Minnesota history, and he refuses to answer any relevant question.”

Now, Carlson is entitled to his opinion.  Of course, his own record is one of a governor who ruled in generally good times; 1990-1998 was a pretty cha-cha time in Minnesota, barring a brief recession early on as the Defense industry retrenched and the Iron Range went through its usual, eternal spasms.  The booming economy gave Carlson repeated budget surpluses – which he promptly turned into permanent entitlement spending, which promptly turned into deficit-fodder when times turned tough in 2000 and again in 2008.   State government zoomed in size.   His own record is that of someone who spent money like a crack whore with a stolen gold card.  We, The People of Minnesota, financed his spending spree with a healthy cut off of our take from the good times in this state.  Had he governed in tough times – as Pawlenty did, through two recessions – he’d have presided over a California-like collapse, in all likelihood.

That’s fine.  Again, he can have his opinion.

But the regional media would have you believe that we, the current MNGOP, have to continue paying obeisance and honor to someone who not only spits on what we believe, but actively tries to use his old (ancient!) party credentials against us, and our candidates, and our most successful alumnus so far!

What would the DFL do to someone like that?  Ask Randy Kelly!

Forget about calling Arne Carlson a “Quisling”, as Tony Sutton did – accurately, if a bit hyperbolically.

We’re not supposed to criticize him in any way – as if having been a spendthrift governor in cha-cha times gives him papal-esque infallibility.