I got a bunch of responses over yesterday’s piece on the $800-million-and-change budget surplus announced yesterday.
Joe Doakes of Como Park writes:
Yesterday, we were told to expect a budget shortfall of a nearly a Billion dollars. Brace for cuts.
Today, we’re told we have a surplus of a nearly Billion dollars. Spending spree!
That’s a swing of TWO BILLION DOLLARS overnight.
Two things:
A. How can the preliminary estimates be off by that much money? And
B. Do you wonder why I have absolutely no confidence in this administration?
Joe Doakes
Como Park
Lack of confidence in the Dayton regime is always, always justified.
Others wrote – via email, twitter and in the comment section – that the sudden increase smells like a ploy, and I did my endzone happy dance too early. It means either…:
- Dayton told his Management and Budget office to show a surplus to help bail him out on the stadium issue, or…
- …he told them to find some more money so the GOP would relent on spending; since he can’t browbeat them into raising taxes, he’ll try browbeating us into spending money, that, quote, “we already have”.
My answer: doesn’t matter. If the surplus doesn’t exist, the Governor needs to be called on it. If it does, it needs to be rebated to the taxpayers, or at the very most pushed to the schools to eliminate the DFL’s big shrieking point the “budget shift”.
At any rate – either way, the Legislative GOP majority needs to stay the course that it was sent to Saint Paul to carry out.
If I owned stock in a company that had a two billion dollar swing in anticipated vs. actual revenues and the CFO came out and, quoting his 8-year old, said: “SURPRISE”, I’d sell my stock and short the company. But, this is government, and they are held to a much, much, much lower standard.
But you gotta love Gov. JimBeam for his dour, pity party demeanor at the announcement and his reminding all listening that there are still people hurting out there. It’s as if he knew that the Republicans deserve the credit for the surplus and he wasn’t about to give them any.
Well my property taxes went up 30% without any meaningful change in local spending so I think I know what I’d like done with the extra money…
Make that 39%
Sounds like at this point the GOP is going to sit tight until the February forecast, STILL expected to show us $1.5 Billion in the hole, so prepare for more cuts (that should have been made in the first place). The GOP should never have spent every nickel of the $34B projected to come in by the same bunch that can’t add straight. They should have stuck to the $32B they were sure they could get.
We’re only 2 days into December. Minneapolis, St. Paul, Duluth and St. Cloud have a lot of snow to plow yet. Ryback and Coleman have proven that they can plow through a billion in no time.
How about Saint Paul “finding” $3million that has been sitting around for more than 5 years?
http://www.twincities.com/opinion/ci_19367395
When do we start the “Occupy City Hall” movement to demand some accountability from government Fat Cats that see a million dollars as chump change?
Oh, Mitch…you *have* to fisk this:
http://www.twincities.com/ci_19453175
“Carrie Daklin is mad as hell and doesn’t want to take it anymore. But she may have to – meaning she could pay substantially more in property taxes next year.
Daklin is an unemployed writer-researcher and single mother of three from Merriam Park, a solidly middle-class St. Paul neighborhood. ”
The newly re-elected moonbat council in St. Paul is using it’s mandate to increase prop. taxes by 6.5%…that’s on TOP of the homestead increase. Hey, bicycle advisory boards don’t run on pnuematic dreams…they need cold, hard cash!
I’m going to strut in the door tonight, and greet my bride with another proof that moving out of SP was an act of pure, unadulterated genius…then maybe I’ll demand steak, I dunno.
My taxes in the People’s Republic of Bloomington, actually went down 1%! Woo! Hoo! I can buy another case of Schell’s Pils!
Nothing about this surplus passes the smell test. A) I don’t believe we can have more when we’ve spent more and, B) I don’t trust this administration to tell me the truth without first scrubbing the details to suit their own agenda.
I cannot trust them. How did these numbers come out of nowhere? My sarcastic and cynical guess is these numbers are meant to help us digest the effects of swallowing a stadium.
for those people who think property tax is related to policy keep in mind:
* Did your house value change?
* Did any levies end?
* Did any city have an election year? Bloomington for example held an election so this year they had taxes down.
Walter Hanson
Minneapolis, MN
Mitch:
Best policy to have a surplus. Spend as little as possible. I suppose we can credit the Republicans for holding that number down.
Walter Hanson
Minneapolis, MN
My property taxes went down for the first time since I inherited this house in 1997. They went down $10. That’s TEN whole dollars. Of course, it also lost another roughly 20% of the taxable value from last year.