For a bit more context on just how inadequate the House GOP’s proposed $500 million bonding bill is, here’s a bit of historical context. The chart below shows bonding since 1994, expressed in terms of 2011 dollars:

(Source [PDF])

As you can see, and as I mentioned earlier, the Governor’s proposal is right in line with previous years. The House GOP’s proposal, on the other hand, would be the lowest in two decades.

It makes absolutely no sense to propose the smallest bonding bill in two decades at a time when we’re trying to recover from a recession. The GOP will try to pretend this is somehow about fiscal responsibility, but that’s nonsense. First of all, they’ve already proven that they don’t care about fiscal responsibly. Second, the Governor’s plan would reduce our debt-service payments. There’s simply no legitimate reason to hold back our economy.

We had some good economic news today: The economy added 200,000 jobs, and unemployment ticked down to 8.5 percent. We do seem to be slowly working our way out of the recession, and growth is even picking up year-over-year.

One thing I can’t help but notice in every monthly jobs report, though, is that we’re continue to slow down our recovery with public-sector job cuts. In fact, while private-sector hiring improved in 2011, public-sector layoffs got worse.

If we had stopped public-sector layoffs, we’d have at least 280,000 more jobs right now, and almost certainly more. Why more? Because each of those 280,000 workers would be contributing to the economy, increasing consumer demand and thus providing an impetus for even more private-sector hiring.

I’m glad our recovery is starting to speed up. But it would go a lot faster if we didn’t have one foot on the gas and the other on the break.

Republicans have tried to claim that we have a spending problem. They claim they’re not cutting the budget at all, and spending is actually rising! Unfortunately, that’s completely untrue.

In fact, we actually have a revenue problem. Revenue in Minnesota has dropped significantly since the early 1990s, according to data from the Department of Revenue [XLS]. As a percent of total personal income in the state, state and local tax revenues have declined significantly over the past two decades.

That means that in the aggregate, Minnesotans are paying a smaller percentage of our income in taxes than we have in decades. But that’s not the whole story. As I’ve been saying, the rich are getting special treatment.

As a whole, Minnesotans are paying less in taxes. In reality, though, you and I are paying about the same as we always have. It’s the rich who have seen their taxes go down — that’s our revenue problem.

[Chart from the 2011 Tax Incidence Study (PDF)]

Yesterday, I wrote that the rich still pay a smaller percentage of their income in taxes in Minnesota than the state average. I want to quantify that a bit further, using data from the Tax Incidence Study [PDF, see table 2-2].

In fact, the richest 10 percent of Minnesotans make 42 percent of all of the income in the state. However, they pay only 38 percent of the taxes. In contrast, the bottom 50 percent — fully half of all Minnesotans — make only 15 percent of the income, but they pay 17 percent of the taxes.

Here’s one more chart to file under “the rich are doing just fine, thank you.” We keep hearing about how the rich are somehow being persecuted, those poor folks. To hear the Fox News set tell it, the rich really have it rough these days. And yet whenever it comes time to make sacrifices, we’re always told it’s the unemployed, students, and even babies who must sacrifice — never the rich.

You’ll have to excuse me if I don’t feel too bad, though. For the last 3 decades, income for the top 5 percent has been soaring. It’s not just their income, though — it’s their income after taxes. So much for that crushing tax burden that’s forcing the rest of us to sacrifice, huh?

But wait, there’s more. The chart below shows that their after-tax income isn’t just growing, it’s becoming a larger and larger percentage of all income earned in the country. In 2007 (the latest year for which the CBO has data), the top 5 percent earned nearly 30 percent of all after-tax income. The richest Americans keep taking a bigger and bigger slice of the pie, but they have the nerve to tell the rest of us that we’re the ones who need to make sacrifices?

[Data via the Congressional Budget Office.]

[Data via Senate.gov]

The Obama/McConnell tax “compromise” doesn’t just give billions to the aristocracy — it also raises taxes on the poorest Americans. This is just another sign of our policymakers’ priorities. They serve the moneyed elite, and not the vast majority of Americans.

As I wrote yesterday, the “compromise” would replace Obama’s Making Work Pay tax credit with a payroll-tax holiday. There is a significant difference between the two, and the result isn’t pretty. Under the new bill, the rich would once again get larger tax breaks. Anyone making less than $30,000 per year, on the other hand, would actually see their taxes increase.