You depend on government.
You are a government worker. You’re looking at the budget negotiations, and noticing that at the Department of Transportation, even though the Governor and the Legislature were eight tenths of a percent apart on their budgets – something even the Hatfields could have negotiated with the McCoys – Dayton vetoed the Transportation budget.
Dayton is holding you hostage.
You depend on government. You are a walking, talking country western song, only it’s just not funny; you’ve been laid off, your significant other bailed leaving you with three kids to feed and clothe and try to insure. One of them has chronic, serious health problems – and in your current state, you have no choice but to try to get help from the state. But Mark Dayton has opted to stop all payments via Health and Human Services to health-care providers during the shutdown – indeed, he has specifically engineered that result from the budget battle.
Governor Dayton is holding you hostage.
The Republicans offered a budget that, by any rational measure, is a useful compromise; a 6% raise. Too much for conservatives, but certainly more than enough to run the government at a time when none of the rest of us are getting 6% raises. If a solution was what he wanted – for your benefit, Mr State Worker, and you, Ms. State Insurance customer – he’d have signed the Legislature’s budget.
Governor Dayton, on the other hand, has offered a budget that is still a billion dollars from balanced; he’s lying about not taxing 98% of Minnesotans, and he wants to commit us to endless autopilot increases; the bureaucracy will ask for $40 Billion next biennium, $46 B the budget after that.
He cares not one iota about compromise.
He doesn’t care about your job.
He doesn’t care about your kid.
He cares about raising taxes, and no more.
To protect a tax hike, he is shutting the government down.
Which doesn’t harm most of us; the vast majority of GOP voters only notice the state government on payday, or when we see a Highway Patrol car out on the road. We may or may not notice at all if the government shuts down.
But you will, Mr Employee and Ms. Client.
And it’s you he’s holding hostage.
It’s you he’s warning; “dont’ break ranks with the unions and your DFL, or this will hurt you baaaad”.
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