MNPublius: “More Money Laundering!”

I want to take a vacation this summer.  I want to go to Norway to run down some of the geneology on both my parents’ sides.

Of course, a key part of making that happen, budget-wise, is going to be getting other people to buy my groceries and pay my utility bills for the next few months.  Or better yet, in perpetuity.

Lots of vegetables, everyone, please?

———-

Absurd?

Well, no.  That’s how cities and counties have been ratcheting up their lifestyles for decades in Minnesota – through “Local Government Aid”, which allows local governments to spend money that they don’t have to raise by taxing their own residents directly,  because the state passes it on to all Minnesota taxpayers.

It’s a perverted vestige of a holdover from the 1970’s “Minnesota Miracle”, originally designed to give poorer outstate town and school districts a little more even financial playing field with the once-wealthy Twin Cities.

In other words, “political welfare”.

And like any kind of public welfare, there is a legitimate reason for it – and like our public welfare system for people, it’s been perverted far from its original intent.

Of course, “original intent” to the left means “just the beginning’:  to the left, welfare isn’t intended to forestall starvation; it’s about controlling people and society.

Jeff Rosenberg at MNPublius  does what the entire Minnesota left has been doing for eight years, and what theyll be doing for the next six months; he tries to tell the reader that a money-laundering program for local spending is really the capstone of civic virtue.

And he does it to the tune of every single chanting point the DFL has already worn out:

As Tim Pawlenty tries to walk into the sunset, he’s got one small problem: He’s left Minnesotans a complete mess.

Well, no.  He’s caused our governing class to go into spasms of discomfiture at having to react to a tax gravy train coming to an end.  The governing class is perturbed.

The state itself, with decent unemployment numbers and a generally better private sector performance – the sector that actually matters to most of us?  Not quite so bad, and thanks to Pawlenty, set up to recover better than many other states if we ever get Obama out of office and see genuine prosperity again.

Here’s what you NEED TO KNOW.

You are paying billions of dollars more in fees on a long list of items, including cigarettes, parking tickets, marriage licenses, building permits, court cases, college tuition and hundreds of other higher fees on Pawlenty’s watch.

Well, no.

We’re not paying “billions more” for them; we pay the same.  It’s just that the taxes sucked out of each of these are being extracted at the local, rather than state, level.  Because local governments are now more accountable for their own spending.

Here’s more REALITY.

Since 2003, state budget cuts mean Minnesotans pay significantly more in property taxes.

And why is that?

Because we are squeezed between local governments (especially in the larger cities) that are run by the DFL and the public employees unions and for whom spending is their main grip on power, and

Yes, Tim Pawlenty has kept the income tax — which is a progressive tax that asks the rich to pay their fair share — steady since he took office.

Let’s be clear on this – since neither Jeff nor WCCO will:    the “progressive” income tax soaks the “working rich”, the doctors and lawyers and engineers and mid-to-upper management and especialy entrepreneurs that make in low six figures.  The “Rich” – the Bill McGuires and Lois Quams and Mark Daytons of Minnesota – mostly don’t pay income tax; their “income” is mostly capitol gains and dividends.

In its place, he has forced massive increases in our property tax — which is a regressive tax that forces the poor and middle class to pay more. Since Pawlenty took office, local property taxes have increased by more than fifty percent. And that’s on top of the massive cuts local governments are making.

Rosenberg says this like it’s a bad thing.

The biggest problem is that forty years of state money-laundering have perverted local spending.  In Saint Paul, the city budget spends LGA money – money the city doesn’t directly control – on essentials like the police and fire departments, while its property taxes, which it does control, go to nonessential dross like the city Human Rights department and B-list expenditures like the city’s dozens of Rec Centers, and Neighborhood Councils.

How bad have local government spending cuts become? The city of Brainerd has started turning off the lights:

Selected streetlights – in alleys, in mid blocks and duplicates at intersections – started being shut off by the utility in early May in response to the Brainerd City Council’s direction to reduce the street lighting budget by $91,000. Brainerd Public Utilities Superintendent Tom Phelps told the Personnel and Finance Committee that in addition to shutting off lights he’s been reducing wattage in downtown decorative lights and looking at switching to LED lights.

Govenrment having to live within its means, and get more efficient?

Gosh, what will we do?

Our local governments have done everything up to and including reducing the wattage of their lights, but they’ve still been forced to raise your property taxes by over half under Pawlenty’s fiscal malfeasance. And if you don’t like that, it will just be worst under Extremist Emmer.

No, Jeff, I have a hunch it’s not the light bill that’s raising the property taxes.

Think featherbedded union labor, bottomless defined-benefit public pensions, redundant services, salaries that are outstripping those of the private sector mopes who have to float it all.

8 thoughts on “MNPublius: “More Money Laundering!”

  1. he has forced massive increases in our property tax 
    Um, property values have gone down, and so has the tax. I pay less in property tax now than I did in 2005 for my inner ring suburban home. That must be TPaw’s fault too.

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  3. Some people in Minneapolis and St. Paul are paying higher property taxes because their taxes have gone up, even if their property values have declined or stayed the same. No doubt Jeff thinks that the cities are just like the rest of MN. I don’t know about Brainerd but Duluth is a financial basket case so I would imagine they have had to increase taxes there too.

    This past session, the DFL tried to allow school districts to automatically renew levies (without asking the voters again). One proposal was to specifically let them pay for pension obligations. Something is going to have to give there.

  4. Every Year I lived in Minneapolis (Except Ventura’s Buy Down year( it still went up just not double digits)) my property taxes went up double digits. They tripled in the time I was there. In my case the thing that gave was my willingness to put up with ever increasing taxes, a high crime neighborhood, and representation from the likes of Pogemiller, Sayles-Belton/Rybak and Sabo/Ellison.

    As long as our large cities have tax and spend people running them, a population that demands tax and spend policies, and cowardly opposition that won’t dare mention that the path we are on will lead to ruin, we are going to continue this slide as if the tracks were all Greeced.

  5. Why I’m not persuaded by Jeff Rosenberg’s argument:

    1) Given a choice between paying taxes at the local level and taxes at the State level, the former is generally preferable because (a) the government that’s closer to the people it’s supposed to serve is theoretically more accountable and (b) people who don’t like the mix of taxes and services have more options to vote with the feet.

    2) I agree with Mitch that one of the consequences of LGA has been that it’s enabled local governments to live beyond their means. Both State and local government budgets have exploded in the last decade and this is one of the primary reasons why. State and local governments needs to go on a diet rather than looking for another or larger trough to feed at. Things are only gong to get worse as public employee pension obligations come due at the same time Medicare and Social Security eat up the federal budget (one less source of funding for local and State government bailouts).

    3) User fees are the fairest way to pay for services because they’re being paid by people who chose to use optional services. The only issue is (a) when someone tries to pull a fast one and claim that a tax is a user fee (as Pawlenty did when he tried to claim that the tobacco exist tax was a “health impact fee”) or (b) when they’re being used for general revenue rather than paying for the optional service being used by the user fee payor.

    4) I’m not persuaded by horror stories of Brainerd shutting off the city lights because we’ve seen this song and dance before when local school boards ask for a levy increase. They deliberately cut back on popular and visible services while leaving the fat in the budget because it’s easier to (a) convince gullible voters that they don’t have any money than (b) challenging the gilded special interest groups who will fight like Hades for their pet program. Every time your local government claims that they “need” to cut back on something that actually is a public good, they can and should be held account for all of the nonessentials that they continue to fund instead.

  6. If I have the option of a massive tax increase at the state level, or a massive tax increase by my city or county, I will take local control every day of the week and twice on Sundays. The more local the tax increase is, the more control and accountability the taxpayer has.

    Smart city councils will start weaning themselves off LGA now, because the entire house of cards is going to collapse soon.

  7. Last February, yours truly appeared before the W. St. Paul city council to, erm, gently oppose their intended tax increase which was slated to bang our heads on the legally mandated cap.

    As one member began to form the letter “L” on his lips, I reminded one and all that LGA is gone, dead, nada, zip, and that if they were not prepared to start planning to manage our city’s finances on the revenue we provided for the task, that my neighbors (those that had joined me that evening) and I would see to it that they were replaced.

    MAGIC!

    They cut the proposed increase by 2/3 and one and all agreed that LGA was not something they would be relying on in the future.

    We can do this, folks. You just need to get up off your dead asses, show up and speak up.

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