This Is DFL Economics In Action

Did you know Minnesota had a Lieutenant Governor?

Gotta confess, I’d pretty much forgotten about Yvette Prosser Sorum.  A long-time legislator from Duluth, she served Governor Dayton’s need for a politician with ovaries and a relentlessly party-line record, to try to shore up DFL support after defying the DFL endorsement process and beating Margaret Anderson-Kelliher.

Wait – it’s Yvonne Prettner Solon?  Whew.  That coulda been embarrassing.

But not as embarrassing as this bit here, where our “Lieutenant Govenror” tries to talk economics:

Lt. Gov. Yvonne Prettner Solon said the governor’s office wants all who are eligible to enroll in the program, which not only ensures Minnesotans have enough to eat and be healthy, but also helps the state’s economy.

“Every dollar of use of the SNAP program, there’s $1.73 that’s generated for our economy, which helps our grocery stores,” Prettner Solon said. “It helps our farmers. It helps everybody along the food supply chain.”

That’s right – food stamps help the economy!

Because the money that goes into food stamps comes from unicorns, brought to us in golden boxes.

It’s not like anyone had to pay for those food stamps (and the administrators who , well, administrate them) out of money taken from what they or their business had earned, right?

Well, not in DFL world, anyway.

This is a DFLer’s education at work.

14 thoughts on “This Is DFL Economics In Action

  1. I fail to see how a dollar spent on food, even if it was a dollar hard-earned by the person spending it, contributes any more than $1 to the economy. Where did the other $0.73 come from? Leprechaun gold?

  2. As a former resident of Duluth, I can tell you that economics aren’t the strongest point for most people from that area. And the union hand-picked politicians are the worst. All they know about is getting free money from the state legislature.

  3. Mitch, to expand on your post above….it is embarrassing about how little the left knows about economics. We hear it around here also. They think that if we borrow $1,000,000,000,000 from the Chinese, we have created $1T in new wealth. They actually believe that we not only never have to pay it back, but that there are no interest payments to service the debt.

    I was like that when I was 4 years old. My family didn’t have a lot of money, but I didn’t see the connection that if my parents bought me every toy I wanted, that meant we may have to keep our 11 year old rusty car (this was 1970s) for several more years.

  4. Her last name is the reason why Dayton won Duluth. The Solons are the city’s political dynasty family. I went to college with one of them for a year up at UMD. The guy she married worked as a staffer for Oberstar for over 10 years, until he lost to Cravaack. According to a status she posted on FB a month ago or so, he still hasn’t found a job. And from what I could tell, he’s only looking for a public sector job.

  5. I got into this same debate on a facebook group called ‘proud to be a filthy liberal scum’ (I’d go back and link it up but it was all angrily deleted, suprise suprise) and they virtually parroted the same line except they said it was $1.60. I seriously think there is a disconnect among liberals who really do think there is a money fairy out there (although with his policies Ben Bernanke is the closest thing to actually being a real one that we have, and that’s scary). I would much rather have them shop at food shelves or have them have to use actual food stamps because now they are all debit cards because they didn’t want to have people that use food stamps feel bad. You SHOULD feel bad if you have to use food stamps because odds are you put yourself in that situation where now the government is having to feed you. Stigmitize it again and watch the rates of use plummet.

  6. Stupidity on steroids.
    Redistribution of wealth does not create wealth, no matter much Democrats wish it were so.
    Assuming the generous 1.73 multiplier used by Solon is correct, that money had to come from somewhere. Even borrowed money comes from borrowers who then can’t lend that money to someone else or spend it themselves.
    So you need to calculate the opportunity cost. If that money would have returned, say, five dollars if invested in oil production or infrastructure improvement, every dollar spent on food stamps would cost you $3.27
    So there you have it, every dollar spent on food stamps reduces the size of our economy by $3.27. That is why, if you want to move to a rich part of town or a rich part of the country, you don’t move to a place where the dollars spent on food stamp use is high.

  7. Terry, trying to talk economics with a liberal is like debating an athiest. After awhile their logic and arguments fall apart and they got nothing but name calling.

  8. But Krugman won the Nobel for economics, Ben!
    What really bothers me about the Krugster is that he has a platform that he could use to instruct people on the simple, basic truth of how macro economics works, but he instead uses it for political hackery. He can’t keep his economic facts straight in his column or his blog; he was thrashed by mainstream economists recently in his blog’s comment section for implying that European economies with lower rates of GDP growth than the U.S. would eventually surpass the size of the U.S. economy. Krugman’s response was to limit the length of comments on his blog.
    Here is what The economist — not a right-wing publication wrote recently about Krugman back in 2003:

    Now that he is a journalist, it is perhaps not surprising that Mr Krugman seems to have embraced the concept of the free lunch—even though as an economist he should know better. Every opportunity (including lunch, and even including Mr Krugman’s favoured policies) has a cost. Decision-making, not least in politics, tends to be hard because it involves trading off those costs and benefits, with the resulting net gains often marginal and uncertain. Surely one of an economist’s main tasks is to remind one-handed politicians, and their constituents, that economic choices generally come in shades of grey, not black and white—even when they are made by one’s political rivals.

    http://www.economist.com/node/2208841?story_id=2208841

  9. Anytime he gets challenged his response is to either laugh it off or shut people up. I love that a fellow economist took down his argument, because if he really believed he was right he wouldn’t have taken it down, he would have responded. Oh and how often does he resort to name calling, shouldn’t an economist have higher standards than that?

  10. Off topic, but funny as hell. Star Tribune headline today: SENATE OKAYS DEADLY FORCE ANYWHERE

    You have to love objective journalism. It’s just hard to find.

  11. From the “Senate: Deadly force OK anywhere” story in the Strib:

    [Champlin police chief David] Kolb recounted being 10 years old and sneaking onto a neighbor’s south Minneapolis property to steal apples from a tree.

    Based on the proposal, “now the property owner can use force, and even deadly force, against that 10-year-old apple thief,” Kolb said. “You can see the disconnect here with reality.”

    Yes we can, Officer Kolb, yes we can.

    http://www.startribune.com/politics/statelocal/140229353.html

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