Chanting Points Memo: The Boy Who Cried Armageddon

Remember the last Metro Transit strike?

The left and media (pardon the redundancy) predicted Armageddon. The poor, deprived of buses and – so the DFL and media (ptr) seemed to believe) – too stupid to adapt, would starve in their public housing.

“If you don’t get Happy To Pay For A Bigger MCTC Contract, the blood of the innocents will be on you!”

Now, in the first line of this piece, I ask if you “remember the transit strike”; it occurs to me that while it’s a rhetorical question, there might be a literal answer. The strike went (I had to look it up)  six weeks, and by about week three it was pretty clear that Metro Transit really didn’t command either the love or the market share that their press told them they did; people adapted, congestion lessened, and petty crime actually dropped.

The Teamsters wound up settling for less of a contract than they’d asked for – largely because far from the predicted Armageddon, the strike showed how generally superfluous they were in most peoples’ lives.

———-

I’m not the first to make the observation; a conservative sees government as a means to an end.  To have a free market, we need government to enforce the rule of law; to enforce contracts, to protect private property from the depredations of criminals (unofficial and otherwise), and to provide those precious few services that the private sector can not (defense, law enforcement) or, through decades or centuries of possibly-misguided tradition, just doesn’t (roads, schools) do.

Liberals see government as the end; the One Big Eternal that makes all subsidiary things possible.  Over the years, I’ve seen liberals characterize government as everything from a parent presiding over its’ children, society (that’d be us), or as the beating heart and ticking brain of society’s body.

And exactly where, in theory, these two currents collide and interact is, in normal times, the sort of thing Craig Westover and Dave Schultz can debate about in front of a packed room full of wonks, with a cash bar and hors d’oeuvres to make the whole thing more palatable.

But these aren’t normal times.  Perhaps you’ve heard – not only is our national economy a mess (our state economy a little less so, thanks to eight years of Tim  Pawlenty – not that the DFL didn’t try their darnedest), but we have a sharply split government – all the sharper because the two sides, the GOP legislative majority and Governor Dayton, were sent to Saint Paul with clear mandates from their constituencies; “tame government” and “make people give us stuff for free”, respectively.

And the two sides, platitudes about “reaching across the aisle” notwithstanding, are showing no interest in compromise; Mark Dayton vetoed cutting money from the current budget to help deal with the current crisis, for crying out loud.

So there is a chance that, if the two can’t reach a compromise – and it’ll be difficult – tbe government may shut down.

If you’re a conservative, you probably suspect that’ll end up more or less like the transnit strike.

If you’re a liberal – well, you probably already read Jeff Rosenberg at MNPublius.  Jeff is, naturally, less sanguine about the whole “Shutdown” thing– and he thinks we conservatives should be, too:

Less then two weeks into the legislative session, the MNGOP held a hearing about a possible government shutdown, a clear sign of how they see this legislative session ending.

Well, it doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to see that a strike is possible, given the circumstances.  I’d be mildly surprised if Dayton hasn’t done some contingency planning himself (although as out-of-his-depth as he seems, it’d only be a mild surprise).  The GOP contingent is drawn from people – businessmen, cops and the like – who actually have to plan for contingencies.  Cut ’em a break.

Governor Dayton, in a clear sign of his priorities, used his State of the State speech to ask that legislators pledge not to shut down the government:

I ask you, legislators; I invite you; I implore you — to join with me now, right here in our Capitol and pledge to the people of Minnesota that we will NOT shut down their government, our government — not next July 1st, not any July 1st, not any day ever.

Let’s let that one sink in a bit; the governor, “as a clear sign of his priorities” (Jeff’s phrase, not mine) asked the GOP to pledge…

…to blink.

In other words, when push comes to shove – and it likely will – to shut up and give the Governor his way.

Not a word on his own commitment to compromise.  Not a word on deferring to the wisdom of the legislature, directly elected by the people, over that of the union bosses and special interests.

As their hearing early in the session shows, Republican lawmakers don’t seem at all interested in making that pledge. In fact, they seem to be looking forward to the shutdown. Why? Conservative blogger Mitch Berg expressed their thoughts succinctly:

Long story short, DFL: We don’t NEED to compromise; if gov’t shuts down, *you* lose. Not us.

Jeff is nothing if not reliably imprecise; not “Jeff Fecke”-style “comically wrong”, but just not quite right.

The GOP majority was sent to Saint Paul on a mission; tame government.   Taking the governor’s “pledge” – saying “forget about our voters!  Forget our constituents! We’re her for you, Lord Fauntelroy!” before the Governor had released a single (workable) budget! – would be a deeply stupid thing to do under normal circumstances.

And the circumstances are not normal.  The GOP majority is faced by a very weak governor – whose strings are being pulled by a very powerful clacque of sponsors; the teachers’, government and service unions, the media, the state’s academic establishment from K through PhD, the whole phalanx of non-profits.  The weak governor is being inveigled to boost state spending by a solid 25%, and balance the spending orgy on the backs of the state’s most productive citizens.

And they’re supposed to take “the pledge” – and give up their ultimate bargaining chip, and basically tell their voters “sorry about all that “taming government” rhetoric, we didn’t really mean it that much!”?

But is he right? I think he’s miscalculating the potential impact of a shutdown.

Of course, to some extent, it depends on how Berg defines “lose.” Does he mean politically, or ideologically?

I mean, of course, both.

In terms of policy and the impact on the state, the DFL would lose. We believe the government is a force for good in many people’s lives [!!! – Ed]. So we would certainly see it as a loss if road maintenance stopped, if aid to the poor dried up, if thousands of people were denied healthcare, and so on. Today’s Republican party, on the other hand, would welcome that.

But that’s not what I think he means.

Well, not in the sense Jeff seems to intend – “Today’s GOP hates the poor and wants to destroy infrastructure and kill grandma while they’re at it!”.  Of course not.

But Jeff’s case  – and it is that of the DFL and its minions – is based on a couple of fundamental bits of rhetoric that are utterly illogical, but are being spun to try to inflame the maximum possible emotional response from voters.   They want the GOP to fold its hand now, before the budget is released (actually, it will have been released a few hours before this post appears – it is currently 5:30AM), and at all costs avoid all mention that the real choice – the choice that the Governor and his minions, Jeff included, are trying so hard to keep the voter from comprehending – is not between a 25% tax and spending hike and complete desolation, but between a 25% hike and a 6% hike – the $32 billion 2010-2011 budget that we’re living under, plus the forecast $2 billion in new revenue coming in from the Minnesota economy – combined with a fundamental realignment of how Minnesota government does its budgeting, so that we stop pretending that we, the taxpayers, were put on this earth to be the DFL’s ATM machine.

The Governor, the DFL, and all of their minions and stakeholders and hangers-on and Jeff Rosenberg too, want to make damn sure you, the voter, don’t see it that way.

I think he’s talking about the political fallout of a shutdown. And it’s not at all clear to me that the MNGOP would win that battle. The people of Minnesota have shown time and time again that they believe government has a vital role to play. Not only do they support that, they’re willing to pay for it.

Willing to pay?  Perhaps – to a point.

Willing to have that bill jacked up by 20+% per biennium? By 2-10x as fast as the economy grows?

Does Jeff think the people are that willing to pay?

You do remember how many DFLers got sent home last November, don’t you?

Actually, they already do pay for it. It’s the rich in Minnesota that still aren’t paying their fair share. Will Minnesotans support the Republican party going to the mat to keep the rich from having to pay the same percentage of their income in taxes as the rest of us do?

That paragraph is the consummate chanting point (“Chanting Point:  (Noun)  Similar to a “talking point”, but intended to be recited by rote (often as part of large real or virtual crowds) rather than critically analyzed”).   What it’s saying is “you people – the “rich” who make over $130K a year – have something we want; we want your hard work to benefit us – never mind that you already pay most of the cost of government at all levels from local through federal, while over a third of us pay nothing but sales taxes; you should feel shame, and donate your hard work to filling our needs”.

Do “the people” get that?  See last November 2 again.

Remember, although Americans often express our desire to cut government spending, there’s very little we actually support cutting when it comes to specifics. That’s why a shutdown is so overwhelmingly unpopular: everybody has programs they support, none of which are spared.

Leaving aside that it’s not true – the last “shutdown” actually only shut down around a third of state government operations – I think that’s one of the lessons of this past election; people, especially the ones that pay attention, are willing to do with less government, including “their” programs – and especially “their” programs staffed by people who get paid more than they do, and with gold-plated pensions who bitch to high heaven about being asked to pay a $5 copay to visit a doctor.

(“But wait – the people also elected Dayton!  They must like paying more taxes!” Well, some of them do – maybe the 20-25% that are genuine hard-core DFLers.  Dayton won on name ID, and as an uninformed response to the DFL’s toxic, sleazy anti-Emmer campaign, and most likely by not a few fraudulent votes; the voters “voted for taxes” with Dayton as much as they “voted for crazy and petulant” with Jesse Ventura).

Add to that a side of incompetence for allowing the government to shut down, and it’s a recipe for unpleasantness.

Just like the transit strike was.

So there certainly will be consequences. But on whom will they fall? They’ll fall on the party that refuses to budge, that protects the rich at the expense of the rest of us, and that chortles in glee as the government shuts down.

Nobody’s “chortling with glee”.

Just refusing to blink.