…profiles incoming Taxes Committee Chair Julianne Ortman, generally positive but clearly disappointed that Ortman just isn’t interested in raising taxes or even tax reform.\u00a0 Doesn’t she understand the need?\u00a0 Doesn’t she understand her role is to stabilize?\u00a0 Of course, words like reform and stablize really just mean raise taxes.\u00a0 For example, she notes:<\/p>\n
The lightly taxed services sector now accounts for 80 percent of gross state product. The production and sale of goods, taxed more heavily in Minnesota than in many other states, is down to a 20 percent share.<\/em><\/p>\nTaxing the services sector relatively more to allow for taxing goods relatively less has much to recommend it — not least, I noted, the opportunity to shore up state revenues to help erase a big deficit.<\/em><\/p>\nUh, Ms. Sturdevant, there’s a fundamental truth lurking in these numbers: the sectors doing well are the least taxed.\u00a0 Maybe if we lightened up the taxes on the sectors not doing so well, they also would improve.\u00a0 Plus, if you go after services, many of which are quite mobile or available from outside Minnesota, we could easily see a net decrease in jobs, especially if the tax cuts you promise never materialize as so often happens.<\/p>\n
Not to worry, Sen. Ortman and the GOP will first, correctly, “put government on a diet.”\u00a0 But this is not the language of “statesfolk” (sic), just politicians in LoriWorld.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I’m finally feeling confident that our Legislature will back Speed up on that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ve been writing for years about how Lori Sturdevant seems to be stuck in the 1970’s, a time when the Minnesota DFL stood for paying for whatever they believed was needed, and the Minnesota GOP pretty much went along to get along. Lori Sturdevant has always seemed – like our current governor – to be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,2,123],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18096","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-minnesota-politics","category-taxes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18096","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=18096"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18096\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18099,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18096\/revisions\/18099"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}