As I pointed out this morning, the notion of the “Budget Deficit” is at best a bit of manipulative spin; at worst, it’s an outright fraud on Minnesota voters and taxpayers.\u00a0 Especially taxpayers.<\/p>\n
We walked back a couple of the more toxic myths about the Minnesota budget this morning, including the thing all Real Minnesota Taxpayers have to keep trying to hammer home with your friends, relatives and neighbors; the “deficit” is a fraud<\/em>.<\/p>\n And yet that’s only scratching the surface of the myths in this deeply abusive media meme.<\/p>\n “Were Balancing The Budget On The Backs Of The Poor”<\/strong>: On the one hand, Minnesota pays among the most-generous welfare benefits in the country<\/a> – “good” enough to draw people to <\/em>Minnesota to cash in<\/a>. It’s seem we have some room to pare things back without really hurting anyone. But the statement itself is yet another fraud.<\/p>\n And on the other hand, if hard times call for shared sacrifice, then why are “the poor” exempt from…keeping their funding the same, or at the very most to an inflation-adjusted increase, as well as a trimming of the most gratuitous fat?<\/p>\n And by that, I mean as opposed to having “Health And Human Services funding\u00a0 jacked up by, ahem, 37%<\/em> – which is what the DFL-dominated Legislature “forecast” for the 2012-2013 biennium two years ago (see page 4 of this PDF file<\/a>).<\/p>\n Is the DFL planning for 37% more poor\u00a0 people?\u00a0 Or are we going to subsidize the poverty we have 37% more?<\/p>\n “Holding The K-12 Budget SteadyWill Gut Education”<\/strong>:\u00a0 Except that the DFL’s budget “forecast” planned to increase K-12 funding by 7.6% – with almost all of it going to increasing Teachers’ Union salaries and headcount<\/em>.\u00a0 It’s yet another case of the DFL trying not only to insulate its biggest constituency – government and its employees – from\u00a0 <\/em>the economy the rest of us have to live with.<\/em><\/p>\n Budget cuts will “force” property tax hikes<\/strong>: Yet another bit of fraud. Cuts to “Local Government Aid” will make local governments responsible for (more of) their own spending, which is currently taken care of by state taxpayers.\u00a0 Local Government Aid was intended to help smaller, poorer cities afford some of the amenities they couldn’t afford – luxuries like water treatment, sewers, actual roads and the like.\u00a0 It has become a subsidy of DFL-controlled city governments<\/a>.<\/p>\n Indeed, the budget is chock-full of little deficit-building subsidies for one DFL favored class or another.\u00a0 The legislature is going to be addressing quite a number of them – in the interest of controlling the deficit – soon.<\/p>\n Stay tuned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As I pointed out this morning, the notion of the “Budget Deficit” is at best a bit of manipulative spin; at worst, it’s an outright fraud on Minnesota voters and taxpayers.\u00a0 Especially taxpayers. We walked back a couple of the more toxic myths about the Minnesota budget this morning, including the thing all Real Minnesota […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[117,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17464","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dayton-dustbowl","category-minnesota-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17464"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17464\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17466,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17464\/revisions\/17466"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}