The Free Press, Mankato, MN

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February 3, 2010

Our View: Honesty required in state budget debate

The Free Press

MANKATO — Minnesotans shopping for a new governor ready to make sufficient changes to fix the state’s gigantic budget shortfall are going to be disappointed. The various taxing solutions, cutting solutions, or combination thereof now being proposed won’t get us anywhere near to closing the gap.

This first phase of the candidate debate, inadequate cut-and-paste solutions, needs soon to be replaced with honest assessments by each candidate regarding how he or she will deal with this bleak future. What will the cash-strapped state look like under your leadership, governor, in education, in health care, in aid to cities, in programs for the needy?

Give the candidates credit for creative thinking. Their ideas run the gamut: a 10 percent income tax surcharge from DFL Rep. Tom Rukavina; an across-the-board income tax increase favored by DFL Senate Taxes Chairman Tom Bakk; tax increases for the highest 10 percent from Democrat Mark Dayton, higher taxes for wage earners above $300,000 from House Speaker Margaret Kelliher; an extension of the sales tax to clothing priced above $200 from Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak. On the Republican side, the emphasis is on cuts — reduced entitlement programs, the elimination of state agencies and less local government aid to cities from Rep. Marty Seifert; a search for savings from virtually every government fund from Rep. Tom Emmer, for instance.

All of these proposals are intended to reassure the public that your candidates for governor are on the job, doing their best to lead the way forward. Except none of the numbers close the wound. The deficit, projected at $5.4 billion through 2013, is too big to vaporize with any government solution. So how much of a hole will be left over after the “fixes” are installed, the odds of the various proposals ever seeing the light of day, or how that leftover hole might be dealt with under their governorship, remains anybody’s guess.

The Democrats deserve some praise for mixing austerity talk with schemes to increase the revenue stream. Meanwhile, though their tax-averse solutions might sound more politically acceptable, Republican cutting and saving plans threaten to leave the state every bit as short.

Virtually every plan begs more questions. Dayton favors raising income taxes on the rich, but in a state where regressive sales taxes account for a great share of revenue, the burden falls on him to explain how he would bill the top 10 percent of earners a higher share of state and local taxes. Seifert hasn’t come up with a figure on how much would be saved from his ideas. In any case, it can’t be enough to balance the budget. Emmer would look under every rock to find savings, without raising any taxes and fees. His reluctance to offer specifics is telling. “I am not going to because I can’t yet, but you have to look at the whole picture,” he has said.

But the picture isn’t pretty. And it seems a cruel joke that a scarce jobs market corresponds to a debilitating budget shortfall. Cut-and-save measures don’t raise the necessary revenue. Increasing taxes leaves Democrats open to charges of killing job recovery.

For now, candidates for governor can get away with generalizations, but as the campaigns draw closer to Election Day they should be prodded into making their “solutions” jibe with reality. If you’re not going to get us home, at least tell us where most of the future pain might come under your watch.

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