Dear Tom Emmer, It Simply Hasn't Worked

Tom Emmer, Republican candidate for Governor in Minnesota, is now running advertisements about how he'll "attract jobs to Minnesota by lowering taxes" and that "he's the only one with a plan to balance the budget and the only one who won't raise taxes, but he'll be sure priorities like our schools are fully funded."

Sounds great, sounds painless, after all, more jobs, lower tax bills, better funded schools that aren't cutting teachers (either pay or numbers). Yep, sounds terrific - no pain except...

Tom Emmer seems to have not lived in Minnesota in the past 8 years.


During that time, Minnesota has gone from 8th (or 4th as some claimed) nationally in taxes to 26th. In that same time, we've become much more vulnerable to job-loss pressures as our smaller manufacturing has been gutted by "off-shoring" and our once strong, educated labor base and infrastructure have continued to erode. Minnesota used to be considered relatively safe from economic downturns, normally running an unemployment rate far lower than the national average. Those days are gone.

The point is, we've tried this bag of tricks, it didn't work. The MN JOBZ program Tim Pawlenty created and Emmer supported, has failed. The tax incentives to "attract" business, did not in any way, attract business.

Further, while Emmer promises more funding for schools, he hasn't voted that way. What's worse is in looking at what has to be cut now if he's elected? We already can't pay for our roads, we've already gutted our care for the indigent (cutting home health care aid to the bone for example) - in short we've already "redesigned government" (as Emmer says he'll do) in Pawlenty's mostly conservative image, what's next, redesigning it in Texas' image? Do we want to have ghettos and vast under-employment, rampant crime and a judicial system which hangs first and worries about catching the guilty later? Is it our aim to be nearly last in the nation in education as Texas is (47th or 48th depending on how you measure)? One of the keys to actually creating good paying jobs, not just jobs at Hardee's or Pizza Hut, is an educated labor pool. It's why Mississippi isn't the hub of the economic universe and NY City has been (Mississippi is last in education) - if you kill education, you kill good paying jobs. That's been the first and most important of two lessons of Tim Pawlenty's administration. The other lesson being paying only just barely enough to keep the roads open erodes infrastructure over the long-term (which, by the way, the other really necessary element to "creating" good jobs is the ability to conduct commerce). For some odd reason when bridges fall down people think maybe you don't have particulatly good infrastructure. Minnesota hasn't increased the gas tax in 22 years largely because of republican opposition. Opposition which seems to feel having companies pay for the roads they use to conduct that business in the state is unfair, and will chase business away a lot faster than not having roads at all. The upshot is, that during Pawlenty's 8 years in office, the only sustainable job growth seems to have come from "green jobs." In short, jobs created by Obama's incentives for green energy.

One of the other things Emmer fails to grasp is that if you don't cut education, you effectively make sacrosanct about 50% of the budget which you CAN affect. If you're going to increase spending on education, then other things like say local government aid, aid used to pay for police and fire services, etc.. has to get cut even further. Emmer has offered no plan for how he'll pay for any of this, in fact his only education proposal is to use vouchers to privatize education, giving further tax cuts to the rich for private schooling. He's also not offered any plan for how he'll cut anything, or how he'll increase education funding. His pet vouchers program would almost certainly take many away from public schools, not increase funding. But...he just says we should trust him.


Pawlenty had to cut hundreds of programs to (sorta) keep his "no new taxes" pledge, and this state is bleeding services for it. Local communities, just to keep the same number of police they had before - not to increase anything at all - had to increase property taxes. Cities shuttered libraries and schools, Schools cut band, football, art, music, and anything else that wasn't deemed "essential." Apparently understanding Van Gogh or Shakespeare isn't essential to Pawlenty or Emmer - apparently, playing in or growing from participating in high school athletics isn't either. Have I told you this is painless? It is, trust me.

But, no matter that we've tried this in MN for 8 years and nationally for 30, let's go ahead and believe the same old lies again. After all, it's painless. The fact that the rich have gotten far richer during this time while your wages stay flat, heck no problem, at least you aren't paying another .5% in taxes, and best of all the rich aren't paying another 2%, despite making four times as much as they did (on average, nationally) than they did in 1981. All of their (Emmer et. al.) rhetoric and ineffectiveness aside, and even the shell game with the budget that has been played here by pushing debt off to the future aside, all of it has always been about cutting taxes on the rich, and really only the rich. Smaller government meant smaller public services, never ever has meant smaller government in totality. George Bush took the national debt from 4.8 Trillion to 9.3 Trillion, nearly doubling it in 8 years (and that’s without considering the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars which were done “off book”). Those lavish expenditures were done not in a time of economic crisis, and most importantly were done with a conservative, Republican Congress to do his (and his rich friend's) bidding. His most significant economic accomplishments were cutting taxes on the rich and gutting legislation to oversee banks (oh, and forcing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy loans they didn't want).

There is an old saying, if it sounds too good to be true.. maybe you should drink some coffee.