Tim Pawlenty said there would be no special session and no government shutdown. But what he meant was that there would be no official shutdown. Under his slice-and-dice plan, our government will slowly stop functioning. Hospitals will shut down or begin refusing service. Schools will go without billions of dollars are funds are \u201cshifted\u201d away from them. Cities and counties will raise property taxes and curtail most services.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
(“Cities and counties will raise property taxes and curtail most services?”\u00a0 In related news, Best Buy will raise prices but refuse to let you walk out the door with your product?\u00a0 WTH?)<\/p>\n
Leaving aside the reality that at complete government shutdown that led to a re-funding of government on a purely skeleton level that kept only essential services [*] functioning would probably be a very, very good thing for Minnesota, especially if it became permanent, let’s be honest here; the scenario is just not true.\u00a0 Government has plenty of money – way too much, in fact.\u00a0 They just didn’t get the increases <\/em>they wanted, and they didn’t get to fund more increases by raising taxes.<\/p>\nIt’s time to call the Dems on their fearmongering.\u00a0 At the polls, of course.
\n[*] Note to Metro city governments: most of us define “essential services” as police, fire departments and courts. As opposed to, say, planning offices and convention bureaux and civil rights offices.\u00a0 Just saying.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yesterday, amid my Fearless Predictions about the aftermath of this session at the Legislature, I called it: \u00a0Threats from cities to lay off cops and firemen (leaving city garbage collectors, administrators, civil rights commissioners, convention planners, community planning organizers, planning\/policy wonks and layer upon layer of other bureaucrats unmentioned and untouched, because people don\u2019t get […]<\/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-4812","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\/4812","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=4812"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4812\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}