The Dems' Sales Tax Shakedown

In the previous edition of The Column, I mentioned the 400-page tax bill passed by the Minnesota state legislature in the waning seconds of their 2013 session.  As everyone understood, we are still unpacking all the unpleasant surprises within the bill that nobody read.  The latest victim is the state's warehousing industry.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune reports today that "Warehousing firms cry foul over new Minnesota taxes,"

"Most Minnesota businesses dodged a sweeping expansion of the sales tax, but not logistics firms.  The final version of the tax bill, approved moments before the end of the legislative session last week, included an expansion of the sales tax on a handful of unlucky industries. One of them is warehousing and storage."

It seems that Minnesota had not previously taxed warehouse services, nor has any other state.  The reaction of the state’s warehouse industry is to consider decamping to less hostile locales, such as Des Moines and Kansas City.

Reaching the Low Information Voter, Part 2

In the first part of this series, I explore Minnesota’s current political landscape and suggest some messages crafted to reach democracy’s newest key demographic: low information voters.  In this part, I dig deeper into what low information voters actually know, and how to approach them.

Escaping Portlandia

For those of you determined to turn the Twin Cities Metro into a midwestern version of Portland, Oregon, I urge you to read Jennifer Wyatt's account of her impending move from Portland to...(gasp)...Missouri.  Jennifer is chronicling her geographic and psychic journey at her blog I Say Missourah.  From her New Geography piece,

"Ten years ago I would have characterized Portland as a place that had progressive perspectives.  Now I would characterize Portland as a place with few ideas, all perpetually reinforced and more deeply ingrained every day.  People regurgitate a handful of versions of the same thoughts in ever narrowing expressions.  Everywhere you look it is repetition of the same ideas, whether it be on politics, design, or social culture.  People strive to look the same, to dress the same, and to have the same lifestyle...

"What began as a city with progressive and forward looking ideas to develop a new urban course has become a closed container of cultural conformity.  There is a new cookie cutter in Portland, and it is young, alterna-hip, and white."

Read the whole thing.

Radical Chic and Minnesota Media

On Memorial Day 2013, the Minneapolis Star Tribune honored a different kind of warrior (“New cause for ex-radical Sara Jane Olson”) on page A-7.  Billed as an Associated Press (AP) “Exclusive” and written by local AP political reporter Patrick Condon, the piece updates the reader on 1970s-era radical, convicted criminal, and St. Paul grandmother Sara Jane Olson.

Mr. Condon’s piece opens as follows,

Sara Jane Olson, the Minnesota woman who served seven years in prison for her involvement in high-profile 1970s radicalism, is edging back into public life…

Sorry, let me stop there.  She did not spend seven years in prison for radicalism, regardless of profile level or decade.  Radicalism, at least so far, is not against the law.  Ms. Olson served time in a California prison, not because she was a radical, but because she participated in violent criminal acts.  As Mr. Condon notes two paragraphs later,

Captured in 1999, Olson finally pleaded guilty to helping place pipe bombs under Los Angeles police cars and participating in a bank robbery near Sacramento in which a woman was killed.

Note the use of the passive voice in the final clause of that sentence.  Mistakes were made, a woman was killed.  Nobody, really, was responsible, you see.

Reaching the Low Information Voter, Part 1

With the 2013 legislative session now behind us, the 2014 election campaign can begin in earnest.  With major elections set for Governor, U.S. Senator, and the state House of Representatives, Minnesota’s voters have the opportunity to change the direction of the state’s politics for the third time in four years.

For the state’s Democrats, now enjoying one-party rule in St. Paul, the election is theirs to lose.  Thus the focus will inevitably fall on the Republicans’ response to the opportunity before them.   Already, there is no shortage of advice, coming from all points on the political compass.

Minnesota's Legislature Elects a New People

The Minnesota State Legislature ended its 2013 session with a hurried whimper, minutes before midnight on Monday, May 20^th. 

One of the last orders of business—the nearly 400-page tax bill—turns out to have been one of those “We have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it” situations.  The next-day headlines focused on the $2.1 billion in tax increases:  income tax hikes, corporate tax hikes, tobacco tax increases, sales tax increases, etc.  Not included in that figure are the $ hundreds of millions hidden as “fees” in the dozen or so spending bills that fund state government.

Now that the tax bill has passed, the sordid details are starting to trickle out.  Since Monday we have learned about $250 million in tax breaks for the Mall of America expansion, a $33 million bailout of the Minneapolis Central Library, and taxpayer money for a 3M corporate expansion in Maplewood.  The $400 million in subsidies for the Mayo Clinic in Rochester and a $33 million bailout of St. Paul’s Xcel Energy hockey arena were already known before the bill was voted on.  We are preemptively bailing out the new Vikings stadium, on which construction has yet to start.  I’m confident we will learn about more big-dollar taxpayer gifts over the next few weeks.

The Lobby Machine, What’s Wrong With Minnesota, Part 3

In this Part 3 of the behind-the-scenes series on what’s wrong with Minnesota government, we turn our attention to the role of lobbying at the state legislature.  I began this series by posting the question of “What’s wrong with Minnesota government?” and answering it with “private benefits, public costs.”

By “private,” I don’t always mean “corporate.”  By “corporate,” I don’t always mean “for-profit.”

For those readers who have never met one, I am sure that the word “lobbyist” conjures up an image of a Gucci-loafer-clad, $3,000-suit-wearing political fixer, roaming the halls of the capital.

Many want to place blame on individual lobbyists, or the profession in general, for what ails our democracy.  No bogeymen here, I’m afraid.  Like every other profession—law, medicine, engineering, etc.—the problem is not with the profession or its practitioners, but to the ends that they are employed.

Why Not Reform? What’s Wrong With Minnesota, Part 2

The Chamber of Commerce-led group United for Jobs Minnesota ran a series of TV ads this spring against the tax-and-spending ways of our Democrat-led state legislature.

The first ad, “We Can Do Better,” suggests that

“Government needs to spend more efficiently.  The politicians should do their jobs: go line by line and cut the waste.  That’s the responsible approach.”

I imagine that if Gallup or Rasmussen were to poll that idea among Minnesota voters it would garner majority support, among both Republicans and Democrats alike.  Everyone wants and expects value for the money they contribute to state government.

The TV ad is correct, that should be the job of politicians.  Unfortunately, the systems and processes that we have set up to create budgets and spend money at the state level make doing that job all but impossible.

It’s All in the Game

Many a tear has to fall
But it's all in the game

Those are the opening lyrics to the 1950’s pop standard “It's All in the Game.”  This sentimental love song has been covered by every artist from Nat King Cole to Van Morrison.  It also holds the curious distinction of being the only No. 1 hit to have been co-written by a Vice President of the United States (Charles Dawes).

More recently, the phrase (rendered as “It’s all in the game, yo”) was popularized by a character on the HBO drama The Wire.

The hipper members of Minnesota’s political press corps like to add the Twitter hashtag #allinthegameyo as they share their experiences on the Capitol beat.  I understand the anthropological reasons behind this behavior.  It signals both the writer’s cleverness and his/her prominent place within the political-insider hierarchy.

In the past week, I’ve been watching more live coverage of the Minnesota House and Senate proceedings than can be considered healthy.  As the end-of-session silliness unfolds, we have the usual bitter fights over obscure procedural rules.  However, I’ve noticed a disturbing trend in these rules disputes.

In the past few days, I’ve seen one fight in the Senate invoking a rule to shut the doors to the chamber, a second involving voting procedures and another dispute in the House over amendments to bills that change dates.  All of which sounds so hopelessly arcane.

The Senate door dispute at least involved the comic relief of majority-Democrat senators literally sputtering with rage at having senate rules—that they imposed—being turned against them.  The two other disputes involved the Democrat majority ruling one way on a Republican motion but ruling the opposite when a Democrat made the exact same motion from the floor.

The common theme is the arbitrary application of rules by the majority against the political minority.  The “doors” episode, in particular, illustrated the assumption among Democrats that rules exist for the sole purpose of keeping Republicans in line.  That the minority actually expected Democrats to abide by their own rules was taken as a personal insult by affected members of the ruling party.

And that same attitude is at the heart of the recent national IRS scandal.  As the details emerge of the IRS’ treatment of conservative non-profit groups, it merely serves to reinforce what so many already suspected: the system (government) is systemically biased against those on the right of the political spectrum.  This week, columnist Peggy Noonan wrote in the Wall Street Journal about the IRS scandal,

It's not part of the game.  This is not about the usual partisan slugfest.  This is about the integrity of our system of government and our ability to trust, which is to say our ability to function.

And so it goes.  Every arbitrary ruling from the Speaker’s Chair, every time a Senator votes her own financial interest, every payoff to a campaign contributor, every broken election-year promise chips away at the public’s trust in the entire enterprise.

That our hard-bitten, speaking-truth-to-power, seen-it-all local media can turn it into a cynical punch line speaks to how complicit they are in the corruption of the public trust.  Maybe it’s just me, but I stopped laughing some time ago.

Sen. Franken and Political Charity, Part 2

Earlier this week, I highlighted the hypocrisy of Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) in decrying both the political nature of some 501(c)(4) organizations and the biased investigations at the heart of the current IRS scandal.

It gets worse.  The Daily Caller pointed out how Sen. Franken called for the very investigations he now condemns.  The Daily Caller reports that Franken said in 2012,

“I think that there hasn’t been enforcement by the FEC and the IRS, and so there are entities that are taking a 501(c)4 status, and under that they’re supposed to have more than half of their activity be non-political,” Franken said.  “That’s pretty hinky. I mean, they really aren’t doing that, and that I think there needs to be a look at that—that even under the laws that already exist, there are people who should be disclosing who aren’t.  And I think that is where we’re seeing the effect of—lack of effective enforcement and just oversight.”

The Minneapolis Star Tribune website reports that Franken signed a letter in February 2012 with other Democrat Senators asking the IRS to investigate 501(c)(4) organizations.  It looks like Franken and the other democrats got exactly what they asked for: a partisan witch hunt during an election year.