{"id":24665,"date":"2011-12-02T07:34:02","date_gmt":"2011-12-02T13:34:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=24665"},"modified":"2011-12-02T07:34:04","modified_gmt":"2011-12-02T13:34:04","slug":"surplus-second-thoughts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=24665","title":{"rendered":"Surplus:  Second Thoughts?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I got a bunch of responses over <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=24665\">yesterday&#8217;s piece<\/a> on the $800-million-and-change budget surplus announced yesterday.<\/p>\n<p>Joe Doakes of Como Park writes:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Yesterday, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.twincities.com\/ci_19444695?IADID=Search-www.twincities.com-www.twincities.com\">we were told<\/a> to expect a budget shortfall of a nearly a Billion dollars. Brace for cuts.<\/p>\n<p>Today, we\u2019re told <a href=\"http:\/\/www.startribune.com\/politics\/blogs\/134828663.html \">we have a surplus<\/a> of a nearly Billion dollars. Spending spree!<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s a swing of TWO BILLION DOLLARS overnight.<\/p>\n<p>Two things:<\/p>\n<p>A. How can the preliminary estimates be off by that much money? And<\/p>\n<p>B. Do you wonder why I have absolutely no confidence in this administration?<\/p>\n<p>Joe Doakes<\/p>\n<p>Como Park<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Lack of confidence in the Dayton regime is always, always justified.<\/p>\n<p>Others wrote &#8211; via email, twitter and in the comment section &#8211; that the sudden increase smells like a ploy, and I did my endzone happy dance too early. \u00a0It means either&#8230;:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Dayton told his Management and Budget office to show a surplus to help bail him out on the stadium issue, or&#8230;<\/li>\n<li>&#8230;he told them to find some more money so the GOP would relent on spending; since he can&#8217;t browbeat them into raising taxes, he&#8217;ll try browbeating us into spending money, that, quote, &#8220;we already have&#8221;.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>My answer: doesn&#8217;t matter. \u00a0If the surplus doesn&#8217;t exist, the Governor needs to be called on it. \u00a0If it does, it needs to be rebated to the taxpayers, or at the very most pushed to the schools to eliminate <del>the DFL&#8217;s big shrieking point<\/del> the &#8220;budget shift&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>At any rate &#8211; either way, the Legislative GOP majority needs to stay the course that it was sent to Saint Paul to carry out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I got a bunch of responses over yesterday&#8217;s piece on the $800-million-and-change budget surplus announced yesterday. Joe Doakes of Como Park writes: Yesterday, we were told to expect a budget shortfall of a nearly a Billion dollars. Brace for cuts. Today, we\u2019re told we have a surplus of a nearly Billion dollars. Spending spree! That\u2019s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,132,127],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24665","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-minnesota-politics","category-mn-legislature","category-the-incredible-shrinking-governor"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24665","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=24665"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24665\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24668,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24665\/revisions\/24668"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}