Kwama Heaton of Richfield wanted to sign his kids up for basketball camp. But when he got laid off from his job as a car salesman, due to a lack of used cars (due to Obama’s Cash for Clunkers program and cost cutting for Obamacare), he had to cancel those plans.
Cynthia DelAmitri of Woodbury told her family that their annual trip to visit her parents for a week of camping and fishing in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan were on ice because the small recruiting company for which she works is cutting staff (they can’t afford the taxes) and she couldn’t afford to take time off; the big national recruiters would eat her lunch.
Rey Jimenez, your grandmother’s oncologist, quietly decided that added onto the state’s confiscatory business tax rates and absurd healthcare mandates, the added income on couples who earn over $135,000 (he and his wife, your grandmother’s internist) was the last straw. He’s moving to Phoenix.
The media doesn’t cover those sorts of stories (and yes, mine are fictional, but only literally).
But let the government suddenly feel not all fat and happy, and “human interest” is the order of the day for the Twin Cities media:
Camille Miller hasn’t signed her daughter up for Girl Scout camp this summer. The state health care analyst from Woodbury is not sure she’ll have the $500 to pay for it.
Wow.
Not sure I ever paid $500 for kids camp…
Jim Ullmer has told his extended family to forget their annual July 4th get-together at Lake Itasca State Park. Ullmer, a state truck inspector from Crystal, is unsure if the campground will be open.
Because everyone knows family get togethers in local or national parks, or private camp areas, just aren’t the same. There’s something about that patina of “state ownership” that brings people together, right?
They are just two of more than 54,000 state workers bracing for an uncertain summer as the Capitol budget impasse threatens to shut down government services on July 1.
To which the roughly two million of us in the private sector say “welcome to every day in our world, government worker”.
And half of us add “so quit electing obstructionist DFL governors”. The GOP submitted a budget – one that’d keep government running, increase most spending that “needs” it and demand some new efficiencies.
Look for the same cavalcade of woe to accelerate; the Strib seems to be even more in the bag for the DFL this year than they did in 2005.
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