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<\/p>\nLet’s take a quick jaunt through history.<\/p>\n
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Spring 2011:\u00a0<\/strong>Governor Dayton proposes a budget with a school payment “shift” – a delay of payments to schools until after an arbitrary date, the end of a fiscal year, to “move” the spending from one budget to another – of something well over $2 billion dollars.<\/p>\n May 2011<\/strong>: \u00a0The GOP delivers a balanced budget that includes a shift of a little over a billion dollars. \u00a0The DFL whinges that the GOP is “using a gimmick” to balance the budget. \u00a0Notwithstanding the fact that Governor Dayton had himself proposed a “shift” twice as large as the GOP’s.<\/p>\n June 2012<\/strong>: \u00a0The GOP proposes a bill to completely “repay” (i.e., pay before the arbitrary date) the existing “shift”. \u00a0Governor DFLers muttered that paying back the shift would have been \u00a0irresponsible, although they never really said why.<\/p>\n Election Season, 2012<\/strong>: \u00a0The DFL relentlessly beats the GOP over the head with its chanting point about “Short-changing the children!”, notwithstanding the fact that the GOP had made an effort to fix it, only to be thwarted by Governor At this point, to the DFL, the “shift” is a campaign bludgeon.<\/p>\n Mid January 2013: \u00a0<\/strong>The DFL proposes a budget that proposes paying back half of the “Shift”, but in a bill that – notwithstanding that the flood of other new spending and the tsunami of new taxes – has no funding mechanism<\/a>, so the whole proposal is vapor.<\/p>\nMessinger<\/del> Dayton, incomprehensibly, vetoes it.<\/p>\nMessinger<\/del> Dayton.<\/p>\n