Who does government work for?<\/p>\n
If you said “us”, either you aren’t from Minnesota, or you are hopelessly naive.<\/p>\n
For the past forty years in Minnesota, the state budget has grown, consistently, vastly faster than inflation.\u00a0 Not just a little faster, but much, much, much, much faster.<\/p>\n
No matter who was in charge – DFLers or, until recently, the equally-liberal “Republicans” like Arne Carlson – the budget grew, year in and year out, usually by double digits.<\/p>\n
Worse, during the good times our productivity was taxed to excess, giving even more <\/em>of the results of our labor and creativity to the government than it thought it was going to get.\u00a0 And the government, rather than giving it back from whence it came, decided to find still more things <\/em>to spend that money on, “obligating” us to keep that spending going full-steam when times got tighter.<\/p>\n Minnesota has been on a treadmill designed to ensure that government gets what it needs – and wants – first and foremost, for the past forty years.<\/p>\n And there is no way we can keep it going.\u00a0 If Minnesota adopts the budget that the DFL and the state’s machinery demands – a 20% increase over the previous biennium – it will be followed in the next biennium by another 10-20% increase, and then another, and then another, until by the time our children have to try to run things our entire state economy will exist, one way or another, to feed government.<\/p>\n Absurd?<\/p>\n Of course.\u00a0 Because no economy can sustain that kind of growth.\u00a0 The market will collapse, as it did in Greece, and as it is in California.\u00a0 The private sector will go Galt, as indeed Minnesota corporations are starting to do now – keeping their corporate headquarters here, for now, but moving service and manufacturing and even engineering jobs to Wisconsin, the Dakotas, Mississippi, and India because Minnesota is too damn expensive<\/em>.<\/p>\n There is one candidate who will get in front of this trend, stand astride it, and yell “Stop” – whose vision involves stopping the train not only before it drives off the cliff, but turning it around and changing the way this state operations – with zero-based budgeting, with a rational appraisal of what government should <\/em>be doing, with a focus on what really makes Minnesota great – Minnesotans, with their infinite motivation and creativity, working in their enlightened self-interest, backstopped with their voluntary<\/em>, communitarian spirit.<\/p>\n Once upon a time, Ronald Reagan said America faced A Time for Choosing.
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