Tom Emmer released the final part of his budget plan yesterday. As I figured, it was pretty brutal: a one-third cut(!) to LGA, cuts to K-12 education (giving them less than they get this year is not quite “holding education harmless”), cuts to higher ed, cuts to health care (reading between the lines of his priorities, I’m guessing a significant reduction in MinnesotaCare for working adults), and not paying back the K-12 funding shift until later (there’s that “harmless” again). It’s quite the vision for Minnesota. I had an inkling of what he was planning on doing before I read this, and it was confirmed in his talk today: Emmer wants to continue down the Pawlenty path of dismantling the Minnesota Miracle.
What exactly is the Minnesota Miracle? Many people alive today have never heard of it, or know little more than the name. To understand what it meant for Minnesota, you have to go back to how life was before. Before these significant reforms were enacted, local government and school spending was almost entirely based on local property taxes. As you can imagine, this led to pretty significant disparities between rich cities and poor cities, between older cities and newer suburbs. Cities fought each other to lure business development; the quality of education in a school depended to a great deal on the value of the property around it. In short, prosperity was not being shared equally.
So a bipartisan group of leaders (I’m sure modern-day Republicans would denigrate the people involved in this effort as RINOs at best) decided that Minnesota could do things better. Instead of relying almost entirely on local funding, education funding would be paid for mainly by the state, through increased taxes. Local governments that were property-poor would get additional aid. Communities would no longer fight each other for business development: instead, the property tax gains from development would be shared by a region as a whole. This is a gross simplification, but the general thrust was that instead of isolated communities fighting each other and keeping the spoils, the goal was to view the state as a whole as a community worthy of improvement, and sharing resources to allow that to happen.
And you know what? It worked very well. Hence the moniker “Minnesota Miracle”. The quality of education became more uniform. The Twin Cities (and later the Iron Range) shared property tax revenue: instead of Minneapolis battling Saint Paul battling Bloomington for development, they could work together to best plan how the Twin Cities should look, and share the resulting revenue (the fact that the Emmer also hates the Met Council, the organization that does a lot of the legwork in the Twin Cities when it comes to this kind of planning, should come as little surprise). Cooperation, not competition, was the norm.
Conservative Republicans like Emmer, however, do not see this as a good thing. To them, unfettered competition is not a means to an end, it’s an end in and of itself. Cooperation is bad. Sharing resources just weakens the strong and leads to more of the weak. I wish these people would go Galt and leave us alone, but instead they seem bent on creating an “every man for himself” world where…well, where the winners stay winners and the losers are out of luck.
I’d like a Minnesota where every kid has a chance. They can get a good education whether they go to school in Minneapolis or Hibbing or Eden Prairie or Worthington. They can go to the U of M at an affordable tuition rate, or maybe a local technical college where they can pick up a trade. They don’t have to worry about not having health insurance no matter what their parents do. Not a world where they are handed everything on a platter, not a world without responsibility, but a world that maximize the opportunity for all. Not everybody will capitalize on that opportunity, and that’s life. I can accept that. I can’t accept a world where opportunity just exists for some, based on where they live, what language they speak, or how much money their parents make.
We are closer to that world than we used to be, but Emmer will take us a long way away from it. When I graduate from the U ten years ago, tuition was less than $2,000 a semester for a full course load. Now it is almost $5,000, an increase of about 9% a year. Cutting hundreds of millions of dollars will make tuition rise all the more quickly. Many of our schools are already overcrowded: cutting funding won’t improve this. Slashing LGA will take us back to the days of rich city versus poor city. And health care? Emmer hasn’t released the details, but somebody, probably working adults, will be out of luck.
If nothing else, Emmer’s budget gives Minnesotans a clear choice on what direction this state can take. Are we going to be a community looking to improve everybody, looking to provide opportunities? Or are we going to focus on the individual, and perpetuate the “I’ve got mine” attitude of governance that Tim Pawlenty started and Emmer seems bent on accelerating? I know what I want.
Here’s a preview of what’s coming up next: check out this post I did a while ago, especially the issue of tax incidence. It illustrates the notion of who should be sacrificing in this time of need rather well.