As I predicted, Tim Pawlenty did not compromise with DFL legislators. In fact, he slashed the bonding / jobs bill to even less than his original request — down to $680 million. Estimating the number of jobs that this money would have produced is tricky, but based on estimates made by a variety analysts earlier in the session, I’d estimate that Pawlenty just slashed at least 5,000 jobs — and that’s a fairly conservative estimate. I’ll go into more detail on the numbers later.
Of course, it’s not just the jobs that we’ll lose. As with any infrastructure bill, we don’t just hand out money to people; we use it to build infrastructure the state needs. Pawlenty’s big targets were higher education, public transit, and civic improvements. Rather than build these things when prices are low, we will instead wait until interest rates come up and construction costs rise.
At best, Pawlenty has shown himself to be penny-wise and pound-foolish. At worst, he’s shown himself willing to sacrifice our state’s well being to win over a few voters in the presidential primaries. Whatever his true motivations, Pawlenty continues to dig our state into a hole that will take years, if not decades, to dig ourselves out of.
It seems that governing the state isn’t particularly important to Tim Pawlenty; it’s more important for him to be hobnobbing at CPAC, a major conservative conference, trying to promote his presidential campaign. He did find time while he was there, though, to veto a bill that would have preserved health care for thousands of Minnesota’s most needy citizens.
I’m sure that now that Pawlenty has cut hundreds of millions of dollars from safety-net services that help the poorest Minnesotans, as soon as he returns to Minnesota he’ll be asking our richest citizens to make some sacrifices as well. After all, as Mark Dayton has proposed, just asking the richest 10 percent to pay the same amount in taxes as the rest of Minnesota would raise $3 to $4 billion.
Stop and think about that for a moment. You and I pay roughly about 12.5 percent of our income in state and local taxes. The wealthiest 10 percent of Minnesotans — those who could afford to pay more — actually pay only 10 percent of their income in taxes. Yet instead of demanding that everyone pay their fair share, our governor is instead taking away healthcare from desperate Minnesota citizens.
Tim Pawlenty likes to pay lip service to the idea of making Minnesota more friendly to businesses, by which he means lowering taxes. In reality, though, his policies have played a large role in the $3 billion increase in local property taxes we’ve seen since he’s taken office. It turns out that Pawlenty is causing increases in the most burdensome tax for small businesses, while focusing a lot of energy on ending corporate taxes, which our small businesses don’t really mind.
A source passes along some information on a survey that puts things in perspective:
A recent small business survey commissioned by the bipartisan Small Business Caucus revealed that 40% of small business owners in Minnesota cited the property tax as most burdensome, followed by income taxes at 24%, and sales taxes at 13%. Only 8% of small business owners thought corporate taxes were a problem - the focus of Pawlenty’s “jobs-focused” tax cuts.
So I’ve got an idea for Pawlenty: If he really wants to help businesses, he should stop using state aid meant to lower property taxes as if it were the state’s rainy-day fund. When Pawlenty first took office, local government aid stood at roughly $800 million. After Pawlenty’s most recent cuts, it would be about $350 million - a 56% decrease. By taking from local government aid to pretend that he can balance the budget without raising taxes, Pawlenty isn’t just hurting the poor and middle class — he’s hurting the very businesses he’s claiming to help.
Minnesota has long had a system that favored statewide sales and income taxes over local property taxes for raising revenues. There are a few reasons for this. First and foremost, property taxes are unfair: communities that restrict their housing stock to only very expensive homes can raise a lot of money with rather low tax rates, while poorer cities must levy much higher taxes to receive the same revenue. For many reasons, property taxes are also immensely unpopular, so our politicians have sought to minimize their use.
Throughout his tenure, though, Tim Pawlenty has seen local government aid not as a mechanism for keeping property taxes low but as a pot of money available for him to use to pretend to balance the budget without raising taxes. The truth, though, is that he’s just replacing state taxes with local taxes. Every year, Pawlenty slashes LGA even further, and property taxes rise as a result. In the graph above, you can see that as state aid has dropped, county property taxes have risen by almost the exact same amount.
Minnesotans think their property taxes are getting out of control, but that’s not exactly true. More accurately, our property taxes are rapidly becoming normal when compared to the rest of the country. But in Minnesota, we’ve long been used to a system in which property taxes were kept low through state aid. Tim Pawlenty has dismantled that system. He has caused your property taxes to soar, while claiming he hasn’t raised taxes. I don’t know about you, but personally I’d be willing to pay a higher sales tax if it would mean my property tax bills would stop climbing.
As you are probably all aware, last year Tim Pawlenty attempted to balance the budget on the backs of the poor by cutting safety-net programs such as food aid and General Assistance Medical Care, or GAMC. At the same time, he pushed for cuts to corporate taxes, which no doubt would have been paid for by even larger cuts to programs for the poor.
Realizing that we have an obligation to help the neediest among us, and that the loss of GAMC will hurt our hospitals just as much as the people losing the coverage, the DFL has attempted to save GAMC, coming up with a program that would cobble together a few funding sources and reduced payments to providers. The end result is about a year and a half reprieve for GAMC. Hospitals will lose money, but not as much as they would if GAMC were to go away completely. According to the Star Tribune, they say it’s better than nothing.
If we judge our democracy by how it treats the weakest and most vulnerable among us, then clearly Pawlenty’s administration earns failing grades. He has used a terrible economy and a budget crisis partially of his own making as opportunities to unmake our safety net and transfer that money to the wealthy and corporations instead. His vendetta against GAMC is just one more example of what has been his very consistent policy of balancing the budget on the backs of the poor.
Tim Pawlenty has the exact same solution to every problem that all other Republicans have — tax cuts. And despite the fact that we have a $1.2 billion deficit this year, and a deficit that will be somewhere around $7 billion next year, he used today’s State of the State Address to offer yet more tax cuts.
You know, the funny thing about tax cuts is that they actually make the budget crisis worse. I find it horrifying that Pawlenty can continue to propose new tax cuts while simultaneously promising “dramatic and painful spending cuts.” Republicans like to talk about “fiscal responsibility.” Don’t they have a responsibility to help our state whether its budget crisis without systematically dismantling our entire government?
Previously, I’ve written that a $1 billion bonding bill would not be fiscally irresponsible. Today, I’m going to go further and say that it would actually be fiscally responsible to do this. Here are a few reasons why:
It would create new jobs during a difficult economic time, not by creating “busy work” but by helping us to rebuild our infrastructure — something we desperately need to do anyway.
The annual cost of a larger bonding bill would be relatively small.
Right now, interest rates are down, making bonding cheaper, and contractors’ bids are likely to be significantly lower. This will allow the state to get more bang for its buck. We can fund critical infrastructure needs more cheaply today than we could in a couple of years.
Tim Pawlenty, who it sometimes seems is going to great lengths to make the next governor’s job as difficult as possible, has proposed the opposite. He’s proposed a “spartan” bonding bill under $700 million, in essence arguing that we wait until costs are higher and spend significantly more money to build the same infrastructure.
Tomorrow, state economists will release the first financial forecast for the coming year, and we’re all waiting to see how far revenues will fall behind expenditures, which have already been cut drastically. Expect hundreds of millions of dollars in additional cuts to be needed before the budget year is out.
Once the forecast has been released, the next question will be what the Governor will do about it. According to the Star Tribune, Pawlenty wants to wait for the legislature to reconvene to worry about a fix, but why bother? More than likely, he’ll once again just veto their solution and do whatever he wants.
I don’t often post DFL press releases to the blog, but I think the DFL’s statement on Tim Pawlenty’s ridiculous proposal for a constitutional amendment is right on. If this is such a great idea, why didn’t Pawlenty propose it 8 years ago?
I’ll have more to say on this — in my own words — in the morning.
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Pawlenty’s Proposed Parting Gift to Minnesota: Instability
Governor proposes constitutional amendment that would leave Minnesota unable to provide for its citizens
St. Paul (November 5, 2009) — The DFL Party released this statement from Chair Brian Melendez on Governor Pawlenty’s proposed changes to the Minnesota Constitution to cap the state budget at the level of revenue received during previous budget period:
To follow up on Zach’s post, looks like we’ll be getting an earlier primary — but only because Federal law will now require it. Tim Pawlenty doesn’t really support the earlier primary, but his hands are tied, so we’ll at least be moving the primary up by 15 days. That’s the minimum change that would be required under the new Federal law:
A defense spending bill signed into law by President Obama this week includes a requirement that U.S. Military personnel and other overseas voters get at least 45-days to receive and return their absentee ballots for the general election. Minnesota’s September primary currently allows only 30 days. Pawlenty said he’ll support legislation next session to move the primary to August. [MPR]
I love that Pawlenty says “he’ll support legislation” as if he had a choice in the matter. The “supports” the change because he’s required to. After all, it was just last year that the legislature passed an election reform bill last year which Pawlenty vetoed. In his veto message, he specifically wrote: “I am also opposed to the change in this bill moving the primary from September to August.” It seems pretty clear to me that the Federal law is the only reason he’s on board.
Why do I care about Pawlenty’s motives? Because I have a feeling that the bare minimum is all we’re going to get. 15 days just isn’t enough, as far as I’m concerned. It’s better than nothing, but I think we need at least 30 days — and my personal preference is for even a bit more than that. Given Pawlenty’s opposition to an earlier primary, though, I doubt we’re going to get anything beyond 15 days.
Perhaps the most glaring symptom of Tim Pawlenty’s failed leadership has been the budget deficit at MnDOT, which always seems to be millions and millions of dollars short for the projects it wants to complete. The most classic example occurred a few years ago, when Pawlenty and then-Transportation Commissioner Carol Molnau asked private companies to front the money the Crosstown Commons job, because MnDOT didn’t have the money to pay them.
Despite MnDOT’s budget woes, and despite the slow atrophy of our infrastructure, Pawlenty has continued to slash state spending and run up massive budget deficits. The reason he usually gives is economic competitiveness — businesses won’t locate here if they have to pay taxes, he says. Of course, I say businesses won’t locate here if they don’t have high-quality infrastructure to move their products and their employees.
Now, Pawlenty seems ready to admit that we do need more money to complete transportation projects. And here’s the incredible irony: He’s asking Minnesota businesses to pay for it. The Star Tribune reports:
Millions of dollars from corporations are accelerating construction of two major highway interchange enhancements in a funding strategy Gov. Tim Pawlenty and Transportation Commissioner Tom Sorel described as models for future projects.
Is it just me, or does this completely undermine Pawlenty’s whole argument about having a competitive economy? What businesses is going to care about our tax rates if they have to choose between either having insufficient infrastructure or paying for that infrastructure themselves?
I fear he’s Dubya II: a soft mask for an extremist base. I hope he’s serious about government.
I don’t think Pawlenty is “Dubya II.” In fact, I think Pawlenty is more like John McCain — a moderate at heart who’s been forced to run to the right because he wants to be president. Of course, that’s hard to say, because unlike McCain, Pawlenty doesn’t have much of a history of moderation. That’s just my sense of him, and I could be wrong. For Minnesotans, at least, it’s a moot point, because he has certainly governed from the hard right. Who can say whether that’s his natural inclination or a way to build support amongst conservatives?
As to Sullivan’s other question, unfortunately Pawlenty is not serious about government. He’s shown that time and time again in Minnesota. Personally, I think we only need to look at a single decision of Pawlenty’s to determine that he’s not serious about government or governing: his veto of a bill that would require the state to account for inflation in its budget forecasts. Inflation happens; Pawlenty’s insistence on ignoring shows he’s not interested in running our government honestly.
By a large margin, Minnesotans do not want Tim Pawlenty to run for president, according to the latest Minnesota Poll from the Star Tribune:
The poll shows that only 30 percent of adults want to see the two-term governor make a try for the White House three years from now, while 55 percent do not.
Pawlenty is still quite popular. So why do so few Minnesotans want to see him run for president? Minnesota has yet to produce a sitting president, and I would think Minnesotans would want to see a fellow Minnesotan in the White House.
The poll doesn’t go into any more detail, so we can’t be sure of why so few people want to see Pawlenty run. If I had to guess, though, I would say it’s because the Governor is already embarrassing himself and our state. In just a few short months, he has flip-flopped and pandered like a true pro. He has shown that he doesn’t have any true convictions, and that he’ll say or do absolutely anything that will get him elected.
Tim Pawlenty says he’s against raising taxes, but that’s really not accurate. What he means is that he’s against raising taxes transparently and fairly. He’s fine raising taxes by stealth, by passing them onto local governments in the form of property taxes. He’s also fine raising taxes if the move is obscured, such as renaming new taxes and calling them “fees.” And he’s fine raising taxes if it’s just on poorer Minnesotans, such as his arbitrary decision to reduce the renters’ property-tax rebate but not the homeowners’.
Here’s another example — Pawlenty is raising taxes on thousands of Minnesotans who work in both Minnesota and Wisconsin. Desperate to raise revenues to “balance” the budget, Pawlenty decreed an end to income-tax reciprocity with Wisconsin. The Star Tribune forecasts the impact of the change:
About 13,000 Minnesota residents who work in Wisconsin will have to file income tax returns in both states next year, and roughly 8,000 of those will see a tax bump estimated to average $300 a year.
Now, I don’t have a big problem with tax increases. I’ve often advocated a combination of tax increases and spending cuts to return the state’s budget to solvency for the long term. But I also believe that tax increases should be transparent, and that they should apply to the entire population of the state. We all need to do our part to solve budget problems, not just a randomly-selected group of a few thousand unfortunate citizens.
By the way, I’d love to see readers tell me this isn’t a tax increase. Thousands of Minnesotans’ taxes will increase in order for the Governor to raise additional revenue for the State. That’s pretty much the definition of a tax increase.
Tim Pawlenty has been busy. No, not busy being Governor of Minnesota — he has way more important things to do. He’s been touring the United States, trying to build support for a presidential campaign. And MPR has been keeping track. They’ve produced the handy-dandy map below to document his travels — green is for official travel, red is for personal.
People Are Shouting
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