Almanac: At the Capitol

If the Democrats over at the Capitol have their way, Minnesotans can start bragging to the rest of the country about how our tax rates are higher than anybody else's.

Oh joy!

Of course, for all that tax money being extorted out of average Minnesotans, the Democrats are promising to fix all the "damage" done to the State by years of fiscal neglect. To hear them tell it, Minnesota has been on a downward slide for nearly 2 decades, and only a "surge" in government spending can save us.

Now of course the Democrats are right that you need to spend enough on the basics, or you will wind up paying a price into the future. Paved roads are better than dirt roads, and paved roads without potholes better still.

Where they go wrong, of course, is the assumption that if some is necessary, more will be clearly better.

That rarely works in real life. A dash of pepper might make your salad taste better, but try a tablespoon and you will understand immediately what I mean.

Paved streets might be a good thing, but streets paved with gold are just plain stupid.

The same is true for most government services. Paying a teacher $70,000 to teach the same thing to the same size class in the same classroom gets you no better results than paying the teacher $45,000 to do the same thing.

It's results, or in economic parlance productivity, that matters. Unless an investment increases productivity in some real way, it's not an investment at all, just consumption. And that's what the Democrats are proposing: lots more consumption, not necessarily lots better results.

One of the perverse incentives in government is that we reward having a problem, not having a solution. That's why the fastest growing parts of the budget are precisely the most complained about issues: education, health care, and transportation. As long as we keep paying government to have problems in these areas, you can bet they will continue to have crises.

Imagine the day a Democrat or a government official tells you that these problems are solved and we don't need to keep throwing money at them and growing government. You can't. The game that liberals play is to keep promising solutions that are just around the corner.

That's how you keep the money flowing, government employment growing, and hence more votes for bigger government.

It's not going to work this time, though.

Governor Pawlenty is playing with a winning hand, and I think he knows it.
Minnesotans aren't hungering for huge tax increases, and so far that's what the Democrats are offering them. Unless something radical happens in the next few weeks, the Legislature will throw over to the Governor spending and tax bills that can only get vetoed, and Pawlenty will win these battles easily.

Nobody has a clear idea who will blink first in this game of chicken, but I'm betting the Governor will win these battles because the Democrats are overplaying their hands. But until we get close to a government shutdown, it's hard to see who has an incentive to give in.

So sit back and enjoy the game, because it's going into extra innings.

• Increased investments in our K-12 schools with provisions to close the achievement gap
• Provides for voluntary All-day Every-Day Kindergarten
• Provides $125 million in property tax relief for our school districts
• Funds our states colleges and universities including mechanisms to limit tuition increases
• Comprehensive statewide health care reform including a plan to cover all kids with health insurance by the year 2011
• 3% cost-of-living increases in each of the next two years for our health care workers
• Once in a lifetime investments in our roads, bridges and transit systems
• $10 million for the Clean Water Legacy Act to target polluted waters

The worn out mantra of the minority party has been the sky is falling and Governor Veto will save the day. Personally, I prefer to take a more optimistic approach and focus on the positive outcomes these bills will deliver like comprehensive health care for our kids and property tax relief for our homeowners.

Once you get past the empty rhetoric of the minority, you'll notice the bulk of the funding bills have passed with broad, bipartisan support. The fact that the education investment bill passed with 119 votes is public recognition that we need to do more for quality education.

With about a month to go in the legislative session, negotiations with the Senate and Governor will now get serious. Thankfully we're all talking about the same priorities, and are well ahead of schedule.

Are taxes completely good, completely bad, or somewhere in between? If you listen to the radio ads and billboards being published around the state attacking DFL state legislators, you might think the first two were being espoused. Reality, however, is a bit different.

I personally had a tax-related crisis of conscience recently. Because I have multiple sources of income using different tax statuses, I met with a tax professional to help me sort things out. He showed me all the little nickel-and-dime deductions an individual like me can take to reduce the amount of tax I pay.

Given where I stood with the IRS and the Minnesota Department of Revenue, I was tempted. Really tempted. After all, who likes paying money if they don't have to? But I'm a Democrat, I believe in paying my fair share for services the entire community needs...

That's right. I'm a Democrat. I believe in paying my fair share for services the entire community needs.

So I took some reasonable deductions: rent paid, for example. A few regular business expenses. But I left out a few things too, including a pretty sizeable charitable donation, and I walked away feeling pretty good about writing two checks.

And then I thought about the only logical conclusion we can possibly come to if we continue with the logic of the Taxpayers' League and Governor Pawlenty's political-campaign-funded radio ads: "DFLers are bad, because taxes are bad. All government services are bad. There is no such thing as 'your fair share.' Poor people are just lazy, and there's no reason for the middle and upper classes to pay for services we don't use."

As much as my colleague in this space, David Strom, and his anti-tax band of merry men want the populace to believe it, DFLers aren't espousing the polar opposite of that brutal and reactionary mindset. Rather, the DFL majorities, put in place by a wide mandate, are correcting four (perhaps eight) years of poor fiscal policy, and putting Minnesota back on the track on which we should have stayed: a course on which everyone can pay their fair share for services that enrich the entire community, and on which we can all agree that while no one enjoys paying taxes, we are all better off for the contributions we make.

The hallway talk as of today says that the House-Senate Conference Committee on Capital Investment plans to ignore the Governor in relation to marking up the Bonding bill and forward a pork-laden bill stocked full of cash from the surplus and a maxed out credit card to the floors Friday.

We want to have a civil and respectful process as we move forward, but the assembly of the bills need to be constructive and bipartisan in the nature of getting finished.

Let me be very clear: the bonding bill is political low-hanging fruit and is headed to the juicer of the veto pen.

My caucus and the Governor have been clear about having the bonding bill be done later in the session, that it not have so much cash, that it fund needs over wants and that the conference committee work in concert with the Governor and his staff to negotiate out a compromise bill. Unfortunately, that is not the case.

While I would hope that the Democrats would work together with the executive branch, that doesn't seem to be the case for this bill or potentially others coming later.

Let's hope as session progresses, there's more quality time spent listening and working with the Governor and my caucus, rather than just ramming through bills packed with a medicine cabinet full of poison pills.