![\"\"](\"http:\/\/farm5.static.flickr.com\/4108\/4952020177_a626ccd1ff_m.jpg\")
<\/a>The question, as I see it, isn’t so much “how will he balance the budget” as it is “how far off from balanced will his proposal actually be?”<\/p>\nLet’s take a walk back through recent history. \u00a0We’ve been down this road twice before.<\/p>\n
The First Dayton Budget<\/strong>: \u00a0Immediately after the party conventions last spring, Mark Dayton released a “budget plan” that, a fairly casual examination showed, deserved the scare quotes I just gave it.<\/p>\n It was \u00a0three billion dollars short <\/strong>of balancing the forecast shortfall – the $6.2 billion “deficit” in paying for the wish list the DFL kicked down the road after the 2010-2011 biennium – and that was only <\/em>if you left out some gaping holes in his assumptions (that taxing “snowbirds” is legal<\/a>, that the state can cut contractor expenses<\/a> on work that is largely legally-mandated and <\/em>for which by law no state workers can be currently qualified, that cutting “patronage” jobs<\/a> will rack up a lot of savings, that the feds will look the other way<\/a> when Dayton eliminates the testing that is the cornerstone of the feds’ accountability standards, that jacking up licensing fees<\/a> would shake lots of money out of Minnesota businesses without driving them across the river into Wisconsin or the Dakotas, that the state could violate the law in setting up a teachers health insurance poo<\/a>l, and many other gaps. \u00a0Calling it three billion dollars off was a complete gift.<\/p>\n Strike one.<\/p>\n If At First You Don’t Succeed: <\/strong>And then – after Tom Emmer released a coherent, detailed, balanced budget plan – Dayton tried again. \u00a0And his second attempt was, by Dayton’s own admission<\/em>, almost $900 million short; the real figure was well over a billion dollars short, and that’s even if <\/em>all the assumptions above (before “strike one”) didn’t happen (they will), and <\/em>the “wealthy” – Minnesotan couples whose income is over $130K a year<\/em> – don’t move themselves (as “the rich” in Oregon did<\/a>) or their money (as Mark Dayton himself does) elsewhere, which they will.<\/p>\n So given that Mark Dayton has never once submitted a budget that came within a billion dollars of granting his supporters their wish list, and given that his State of the State address telegraphed a “spend like it’s 1972!” approach to the issue, what do you suppose the odds are that tomorrow’s budget will be ready for prime time – other than, of course, by lowering the defintion of “the rich” to “people with jobs?”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Mark Dayton is scheduled to present his budget tomorrow. The question, as I see it, isn’t so much “how will he balance the budget” as it is “how far off from balanced will his proposal actually be?” Let’s take a walk back through recent history. \u00a0We’ve been down this road twice before. The First Dayton […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,123],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-minnesota-politics","category-taxes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18116","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=18116"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18116\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18122,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18116\/revisions\/18122"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}