Minnesota’s reclusive Governor, Mark Dayton, emerged from the shadows yesterday to deliver his budget proposal for the next two-year cycle. Much of the immediate political and media reaction focused on the details: what will or won’t be taxed, what spending will or won’t happen. Such coverage misses the larger message of the Governor’s budget.
I knew something was different as my Twitter timeline filled—while the Governor introduced his budget—with increasingly ecstatic sentiments being expressed by my far-left friends. They were all of a theme that “Dayton’s budget marks a new era of __fill in the blank with your favorite policy area__.”
Parts of the budget may have provided useful building blocks in a different, more coherent program. However, this Governor’s second two-year budget, taken as a whole, represents a profoundly unserious document. It stands as Minnesota’s first “post-modern” budget. It does not meet the Minnesota of the 21st century where it can be found, but rather, the Governor’s budget alternates between addressing a Minnesota that exists no longer (if it ever did) and addressing the world as he wished it existed. In the spirit of the moment, let’s deconstruct the text.
The Governor used a 24-page PowerPoint presentation to introduce his budget. The title (“Budget for a Better Minnesota”) deliberately echoes the Governor’s election campaign motto (“Mark Dayton for a Better Minnesota”) and the name of his principal backer, the political charity Alliance for a Better Minnesota.
The PowerPoint uses the word “fair” (or variants) ten times. The accompanying blog entry uses the term four times. The resulting budget will match few definitions of fair.
In the United Kingdom, on Budget Day, the finance minister (charmingly named the Chancellor of the Exchequer) delivers the budget to Parliament in a red briefcase, which is more than 150 years old. Today, the Governor’s budget was delivered in a worldview nearly as old as that red briefcase.
Take, for example, the budget’s controversial sales tax proposal on clothing. The Governor imagines that he is sticking it to the monocled plutocrat in the bespoke suit. More likely, the tax would hurt the hard working immigrant opening a clothing store in greater Minnesota.
The Governor would extend the sales tax to the provision of “professional services.” The popular image of the professional-services provider may be the white-shoe lawyer sitting in his over-stuffed leather chair, but in today’s reality it is more likely to be a divorced, single mom trying to start a book-keeping business.
Indeed, Bard College professor Walter Russell Mead wrote last month on “The Jobs of the Future” in this tough economy. Professional service jobs will lead us, as back in October Mead wrote,
“Think of these new professionals as navigators: helping people chart a course through the increasingly complex institutions of the 21st century. One of the classic methods of economic progress is that goods and services once reserved to the very rich gradually become available to mass market consumers at a lower cost. Figuring out how regular middle class families can get help that in the past only elites could have is a way by which a new generation of professionals can create their own jobs and chart a fresh course of their own.”
Professional services can become a way for the young and entrepreneurial to gain access into the middle class. A new sales tax does not help. Professional services can be a way to reach the rarified and hated top 2 percent. Higher tax rates on income do not help. The Governor seeks to target “the wealthiest 2%” (his words). Whether by design or not, his tax increases do not affect the wealthy, they affect those who are trying to become wealthy, by accumulating earned income. As much as he claims a budget to “expand our middle class,” his tax changes discourage the aspirational and work to lock in the current class structures.
If Governor Dayton’s tax “reform” policies seek to right wrongs from a bygone era or stifle the emergence of a new one, his many other tax and spending plans refer to the world as he would have it. Consider these: a tax on “snowbirds” not loyal enough to stay put, a tax on smokers who refuse to quit, a doubling of the transit tax to fund the trains no one will ride.
But this Column writes today more in sorrow at the missed opportunity. This budget could have been Governor Dayton’s true Nixon goes to China moment, where he shows how a liberal governor in a blue state can manage within the realities of the current age, unlike his counterparts in California, Illinois and New York. Instead, Dayton chose to appease his progressive base.
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