Tom Emmer continues to make misleading claims about his budget. One of those misleading claims is that he would increase funding for education. As I’ve illustrated countless times by now, he makes that claim by selective ignoring portions of the budget.

The truth is, Emmer would freeze education. That’s a $525 million cut from what existing law says we should spend next biennium, and that’s at a time when school enrollment is expected to increase by around 14,000 students [PDF, see p. 50]. That means that Emmer will be making a big cut in real per-capita funding for education — twice as large as we saw under Pawlenty.

If you ask me, that doesn’t look like holding schools “harmless.” Once again, Tom Emmer just continues to take Tim Pawlenty’s policies to the extreme.