I was listening to a couple of Saint Paul lawmakers talking at a local restaurant the other day.

One of them said to the other “What can we do to make Saint Paul a better place” as he took a bite from a BLT.

The other put down his soup spoon and furrowed his brown in thought.  “Y’know”, he said after a moment, “what this city lacks is government workers.  Yeah, I know – half of the city’s employment base is government offices, bla bla bla, but what about the people who live here?  Yeah, I know, I know – Saint Anthony is all U of M, and the Midway is 70% teachers and AFSCME, and the East Side is half MAPE, and Highland is mostly state functionaries, and Crocus Hill is mostly government consultants, and the city’s politics are entirely dominated by the MFT and AFSCME.  But what if we were to do something to get more government workers to move to Saint Paul?”

The first guy swallowed some Coke.  “More government workers? But what’ll the taxpayers say?”

“That’s the beauty of it”, said the second guy.  “This is the era of “hope and change”; if you take a poo sandwich and call it a “changeburger”, people will pay $6 for it”.

———-

The conversation above is fictional.

The city program below – reported by Jane McClure in the Highland Villager, which is not online – is not (emphasis added):

In addition to the federally funded Take Credit! Program, which provides more than $8 million in frderal income tax credits for qualified first-time homebuyers in St. Paul and Minneapolis, St. Paul is offering the Heroes First-Time Homebuyers Program, which ioffers forgivable interest-free loans of between $1,000 and $15,000 that can be used for closing costs, down payments or even to reduce the principal on a mortgage.

Leave aside the giving away tax money (which is what a forgiveable loan is – in this case, it’s forgiven if you stay in the home for ten years) for homebuyers; there is a sort of logic to getting people into the city’s vast stock of on-the-market (to say nothing of foreclosed and vacant) houses.  Of course, the city government is a big part of the reason those houses are empty and their values are plummeting, and the fed had as much to do with the bubble as anyone did, but we digress.

The program is called the “Heroes” program.  And when DFLers talk about “Heroes”, I think of this, and get nervous.

But let’s give this a chance, shall we?

The Heroes Program is available to military veterans, active members of the armed forces, firefighters, police officers, emergency medical personnel,

Well, we certainly can’t have anything against any of them, can we?

But wait!  There’s more!

health care workers,

Mmmm – OK.  I don’t know that doctors need the help, but nurses certainly aren’t over-appreciated.

But…:

teachers and other public-sector employees.

Teachers and public sector employees?

Just thought we’d slip those in there, did we?

So the City of Saint Paul – run by a government elected by the bureaucrat class, AFSCME and the MFT – wants to use taxpayer money to move more of the bureaucrat class (along with some veterans and EMTs and cops and firemen) into the city, at our expense.  And if you have the temerity to object to, say, some junior assistant district attorney from the Truancy Intervention Program or a petty functionary with the Civil Rights department getting $15K in taxpayer love, the response will be “WHY DO YOU HATE VETERANS AND FIREMEN!?”

And that second bureaucrat at the local restaurant made a lot more sense to me.  Even though he’s utterly fictional.