The Dayton Dustbowl

Almost eighty years ago, the Great Plains – where I was born, a generation later – were pummeled by back-to-back catastrophes.  The first one, the Great Depression, was manmade – a deflating credit bubble whose effects were exacerbated by government intervention in trade (the Smoot-Hawley tariffs, which indirectly crippled farm exports) and the market (the entire New Deal, whose price controls had unintended consequences that rippled through ag markets for generations, as well as land management practices that exacerbated the later Dust Bowl) that kept the Depression going long after it would have healed itself after 1929.

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

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

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

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

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

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

So it’s up to us.

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

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