Wanted: Horse Traders

Setting a single, no-haggle price was a great publicity point for the late, great Saturn marque of cars.

Of course, they are a late, great marque of cars.

I’m not sure if no-haggle pricing was the issue; GM’s bad management had a lot more to do with it.

But whatever no-haggle pricing had or had not to do with Saturn’s demise, it may have been a mistake in this past legislative session.

John “Shabbosgoy” Gilmore at Minnesota Conservatives would have preferred some smash-mouth haggling; I”m inclined to agree:

…[R]epublicans find themselves boxed into a budget corner of their own making. Having won both the House and Senate, the latter for the first time since the 1970’s, they should have been able to advance their core principles in a manner that consistently gave them the upper hand, despite the executive branch being controlled by the opposition. Instead, republicans find themselves on the defensive and playing a poor hand largely dealt to them by themselves.

The shortest analysis is that the republicans erred badly in sending only one “this is it we really mean it!” budget to the Governor and expecting him to roll over.

I’m also not a bit puzzled by the fact that the GOP jumped immediately to the “spend the available revenue/live within our means” budgets, expecting to put it out there and then hold on through the gale of union-and-Dayton-family-funded astroturf advertising and pro-DFL, biased media coverage.   The current proposal – the $34 billion budget that uses new revenue from the February forecast – would have been an acceptable ending point, the place the DFL would fall back to to compromise.

Even that truncated analysis, however, obscures other problems with the manner in which the republican majority has performed. For example, running uniformly on a platform of bringing down government spending while not increasing taxes, one might plausibly have expected them to produce a budget that actually cut spending. Not a budget that was signed into law by the Governor, mind you. No, one that actually required of the majority some intestinal fortitude and made cuts to the bloated mess that is Minnesota state government. The idea that there isn’t largess is laughable. The fact that the Minnesota government is the state’s single largest employer is shameful.

We need more freshmen in the GOP caucus.