The best thing one can say about this year’s special legislative session is that it was short, lasting a mere 11 hours. Beyond that, the budget agreement reached between Gov. Tim Pawlenty and the DFL-controlled Legislature may best be called a mixed bag — and that’s being charitable.
Yes, the so-called compromise reached by the governor and legislators did “balance” the state budget, “erasing” a projected $3 billion gap between revenues and expenditures this year. But, by no means did our state “leaders” resolve the recurring budget imbalance that has bedeviled Minnesota for the past several legislative sessions.
I tend to agree with those who think the governor and Legislature merely kicked the can down the road for their successors to deal with. But why make difficult decisions that will cause political pain today when those decisions can be put off until tomorrow for someone else to deal with?
It sure isn’t because it’s the right thing to do, but that seems to be increasingly rare in the hallowed halls of what passes for government in Minneso-so, as gubernatorial candidate Tom Horner has dubbed our once proud state.
Next year the new governor and a revamped Legislature will be right back where their predecessors have been in the past, only this time they will be looking at a projected $6 billion deficit. What happened to that balanced budget?
Maybe I don’t understand high finance, but to me that is not a budget fix unless one puts it in the context of a drug fix — you feel good in the short term, but when you come down nothing has changed and things tend to be uglier than ever.
I suppose some of my more conservative readers will think I’m picking on Gov. Pawlenty again by finding fault with how he “balanced” the budget. I can live with that.
All the governor did was defer every major decision to next year, leaving the new governor and Legislature to deal with a budget deficit that some say could be as much as $9 billion. Yowser! That’s solving the problem?
But let it be known that I’m no more impressed with the DFL-controlled Legislature either.
Legislative leaders presented a balanced budget that incorporated higher income taxes on the state’s wealthiest citizens, but then knuckled under to the governor and dug the hole even deeper for school districts, cities, businesses and taxpayers.
