{"id":394,"date":"2010-09-08T21:21:53","date_gmt":"2010-09-09T02:21:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nathanhunstad.com\/blog\/?p=394"},"modified":"2010-09-08T21:22:25","modified_gmt":"2010-09-09T02:22:25","slug":"emmers-budget-fantasy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.nathanhunstad.com\/blog\/2010\/09\/emmers-budget-fantasy\/","title":{"rendered":"Emmer’s budget fantasy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tom Emmer has been rightly criticized for not revealing the details of his budget (the Grand Forks Herald, not exactly a liberal newspaper, has a particularly brutal<\/a> dressing-down of Emmer). So far, he\u2019s released a program of more than $600 million in tax cuts, which only widens the budget deficit Minnesota faces. Why hasn\u2019t he released a detailed budget yet? Probably because there\u2019s little way he can make the numbers honestly add up.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Want to get your hands dirty and try to solve the problems that Minnesota is facing? Go to My Minnesota Budget<\/a>, a fantastic budget calculator that lists just about every tax and expenditure that the legislature has control over. Start with a $5.7 billion dollar deficit, and then try to balance the budget.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not easy. In fact, it\u2019s next to impossible. I came up with a plan that used a bit less than $2 billion in new revenue and about $4 billion in budget cuts. I\u2019m not running for office, so no, I\u2019m not going to detail my plan, but by necessity it included draconian cuts to specific programs and even unrealistic zeroing-out of entire budget lines (plus, a bit more revenue for things like our public defender system, which is currently in a severe crisis<\/a>). Such a plan is politically impossible, so you\u2019d need even more draconian cuts or even more revenue, two more near-impossibilities.<\/p>\n

Emmer, by proposing tax cuts<\/em> instead of more revenue, would have to cut the budget by over $6 billion to put it into balance. What would that entail? Well, if he did nothing else, it would require cutting K-12 education funding in half<\/strong>. But he appears to want to hold K-12 harmless. So perhaps he could eliminate funding for nursing homes and health care for 150,000 elderly<\/strong>; that would almost take care of the deficit and his tax cuts by themselves; he could eliminate sliding-fee child care to take care of the rest. He could zero out all higher ed funding and it wouldn\u2019t come close to doing it by itself. Eliminating property tax refunds and LGA would similarly fall well short. Completely eliminating ‘\u201dwelfare\u201d, known as MFIP, would get you about 3% of the way there. Eliminating all public safety wouldn\u2019t do it. In fact, eliminating all Higher Ed, Public Safety, State Government, Environment, and Economic Development funding<\/strong> wouldn\u2019t solve the budget deficit and cover his tax cuts, although it would cover the deficit as-is. If, however, on top of all those budget eliminations, you eliminated all Agriculture and Veterans funding, and eliminated free lunches for kids in poverty, that would cover his $626 million in tax breaks.<\/p>\n

Of course, eliminating entire budget lines is not possible, for legal, political, and practical reasons. So his plan will necessitate across-the-board cuts. The size of those cuts depends on what areas of the budget he protects; if he does protect K-12 spending like he apparently wants to, we are talking serious, serious cuts everywhere else. I don\u2019t see how this works out, and in all likelihood, neither does his campaign yet. That\u2019s why everybody is waiting.<\/p>\n

Going even further, Emmer sometimes claims that the deficit \u201cisn\u2019t real\u201d because we will be taking in more revenue next biennium than this one, so by holding funding constant that\u2019s not really a cut. Perhaps in Emmer\u2019s reality there is no concern with rising prices and health care costs: seeing has how he has never put forward a serious plan to reign in health care spending and cover more people, maybe he isn\u2019t very concerned with these issues. However, our health care providers, school districts, and everybody else can\u2019t just wish these costs away. Especially in Health and Human Services, holding funding flat is effectively a huge cut. This goes double in a recession when there is more demand for safety net services.<\/p>\n

The next governor of the state of Minnesota is going to face a budget crisis that most people can\u2019t comprehend. Every way out of it will be a terrible one. But refusing to even detail how to deal with that deficit? That\u2019s akin to a candidate running for office the day after Pearl Harbor refusing to detail a war strategy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tom Emmer has been rightly criticized for not revealing the details of his budget (the Grand Forks Herald, not exactly a liberal newspaper, has a particularly brutal dressing-down of Emmer). So far, he\u2019s released a program of more than $600 million in tax cuts, which only widens the budget deficit Minnesota faces. Why hasn\u2019t he… Continue reading Emmer’s budget fantasy<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[137],"class_list":["post-394","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-governor","entry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.nathanhunstad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.nathanhunstad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.nathanhunstad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.nathanhunstad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.nathanhunstad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=394"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.nathanhunstad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":395,"href":"http:\/\/www.nathanhunstad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394\/revisions\/395"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.nathanhunstad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=394"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.nathanhunstad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=394"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.nathanhunstad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}