The Agenda
By Mitch Berg
To hear the media and the lefty chanting classes, you’d never know that the most recent poll that matters – November of 2010 – showed that Minnesotans support candidates who support lower taxes, lower regulation and less government.
And then there’s the crowd in the DFL and media (PTR) that believes the Minnesota GOP’s internal spasms have anything to do with what’s going on in the Legislature (which, don’t forget, was elected via the Caucus’ efforts; the state party has very little to do with electing legislators).
And they’re going to do their darnedest to try to negate that election.
Against that, as the session kicks off today, we have Speaker of the House Kurt Zellers and House Majority Leader Matt Dean, who h laid out their agenda in the Strib over the weekend:
What a difference a year makes.
Last January, there was more than a foot of snow on the ground, the state was facing a $5.2 billion budget deficit, and Gov. Mark Dayton and the DFL were calling for huge tax increases.
This year, we have no snow to speak of, there is an $876 million budget surplus, and Dayton and the DFL are declaring job creation the No. 1 priority of the 2012 session.
Zellers and Dean are too diplomatic to point out that Governor Dayton’s “Jerbs Plan” is, in every particular, rotting fly-covered suppurating bulls**t.
Fortunately, I’m not that diplomatic, and that’s exactly what the Jerbs plan is.
The GOP has the real jobs plan:
Our economic recovery is too important to become just another line item in the state’s biennial budget that is continually subject to change.
Republicans in the Legislature are focused on the long-term structural needs of our state. Our Reform 2.0 agenda was developed with the input of Minnesotans.
We spent the last five months traveling the state, driving thousands of miles to dozens of cities to meet with hundreds of job providers, local government officials, educators and citizens to listen to their ideas on what government can and should do better.
One of the most maddening DFL chanting points last session was “What is the MNGOP doing to create Jerbs?”, as if they expected the GOP tom, I dunno, pass a law requiring employers to hire people.
The GOP has a grasp on actual reality, fortunately:
In Minnesota, almost one-third of the new job growth in this decade will be in science and math fields. However, these new jobs will not exist unless we reform our education system.
As part of Reform 2.0, we will continue to push for strong teacher evaluations, pay linked to teacher and student performance, and the removal of barriers to get rid of bad teachers. Seniority privileges should not trump student achievement.
Can you see the Minnesota Federation of Teachers hiring assassins yet?
Well, this next section will fix that…:
We will also give serious consideration to granting the mayors in Minneapolis and St. Paul mayoral control of their respective school districts. In addition, we will support an aggressive plan to turn around the lowest-achieving schools in Minnesota and will allow for aggressive replication of high-performing charter schools.
While the idea of Chris Coleman controlling the Saint Paul Public Schools doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence, the point is that the administrative logjam does need to get broken, especially in the Twin Cities, if education is ever going to improve.
We are 20 years behind in streamlining government, and Minnesota taxpayers are paying for it every day. This session we will continue our push to make government more effective for the people it serves and those who pay for it.
From local government mandate relief and outcome-based spending to consolidation of administrative and back-office functions, our reforms will seek out and eliminate waste.
I’m looking forward to our next interview on the NARN.
We will also support a great idea we received while out on the road: require city and county governments to present budget and spending information in an easy-to-understand format designed to educate taxpayers and engage citizens in local government spending decisions.
I’m dying to see how the Rybak and Coleman react to the idea the people can actually read their budgets.
As a usability practitioner, I’d be more than happy to help. Have your people call my people.
In 2011, many good reform ideas were put on hold as we grappled with the budget (and the snow). Today we’re pledging to make 2012 the year of reform.
This is not a partisan agenda. It’s Minnesota’s agenda — an agenda we can’t let rest.
And I’m out to support that agenda.
Along with a few other things; let’s keep Zero-Based Budgeting in the spotlight. And let’s pass Tony Cornish’s “Stand Your Ground” bill – not just on Second Amendment grounds, but because if Dayton vetoes it, it’ll lose the DFL tens of thousands of outstate votes, and not a few in the Metro to boot.
It’s gonna be a fun session!
January 24th, 2012 at 10:06 am
Don’t forget to give the Guv one or three more chances to sign Voter ID, and forget about giving those under-achieving Vikings a deluxe playpen on the taxpayers’ dime.
January 24th, 2012 at 5:26 pm
In his State of the State Address yesterday, my governor (Neil Abercrombie, D-1968) has come out in favor of both job creation and education. That took courage! He’s given in to his soda-pop taxing obsession again. The only interesting thing he had to say was that he wants to run cables & put the entire state on a single power grid. As it is each of the Hawaiian islands has its own grid. Not very efficient to have multiple grids, but linking them together would be expensive.
On the other hand, there have been “forces” at work for years pushing the project of generating geothermal power on the Big Island and exporting it to the rest of the state. I don’t know how the dollars work out, but it has potential (ha! Power joke!). Today the big Island uses ~100MW of electricity and it gets about a quarter of that from Puna Geothermal. To supply a like percentage of power state wide we’d have to build about ten times as much geothermal capacity on the Big Island. Local jobs that can’t be exported in the technical & construction industries. Sounds like a winner to me.