I caught a bit of DFL Senate Minority Leader Tom Bakk and House Minority Leader Paul Thissen on the Keri Miller show on MPR one morning last week.<\/p>\n
First – while I often bag on Miller for painting the toenals of liberal guests on the air, she did stick a few good questions in there.<\/p>\n
But I liked this bit here.\u00a0 Bakk said (paraphrasing closely) “Minnesotans keep saying they’re overtaxed.\u00a0 It’s just not true<\/em>“.<\/p>\n He pointed out that since Jesse Ventura’s cuts to the personal income tax back in 1999 and 2000, Minnestoans have “paid less in taxes”. \u00a0It’s wrong, of course; business taxes get passed on to Minnesotans as surely as the income tax does. \u00a0And if you recall, Ventura, who had to run to the DFL to get any legislative support at all, turned about a third <\/em>of the surpluses of his first two years into tax cuts;\u00a0the Legislature – which was dominated by DFLers, including Bakk, at the time – spent the other <\/em>two thirds on permanent entitlements, laying the groundwork for the endless deficits we currently fight with.<\/p>\n But let’s take Bakk at his word for the moment, and assume that Minnesotans’ tax burdens dropped, and stayed dropped, during the Ventura Administration.<\/p>\n Minnesota also rode out the last two recessions – this one and the 2001 Dot Bomb – better than most of the United States. \u00a0Our unemployment rate was, stayed, and is in the lower ten of rates in the US, and was for both recessions.<\/p>\n Just saying – Keri Miller? \u00a0Please keep booking Bakk. \u00a0He’s a never-ending fount of material.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I caught a bit of DFL Senate Minority Leader Tom Bakk and House Minority Leader Paul Thissen on the Keri Miller show on MPR one morning last week. First – while I often bag on Miller for painting the toenals of liberal guests on the air, she did stick a few good questions in there. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19037","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-minnesota-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19037","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=19037"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19037\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19063,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19037\/revisions\/19063"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19037"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19037"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19037"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}