Halverson Retort

        I just received Rep. Laurie Halverson's "Legislative Update" or in other words "Democratic Party Propaganda".  Obviously the DFL party wants to keep us all aware of how great they are doing and there is no fighting or shut downs on the state level now that she and the DFL are in control.  Some of the "good news" includes: $636 million more dollars came in than we expected and we can pay that back to the schools!  or how about,  "we spent an additional $600 million on education" or "we added 12,200 more jobs!"
All this, she says, is because we are willing to compromise in Minnesota, unlike the Feds or even better unlike when the Republicans were here in the state house. Republicans did not have full control of all three branches, like the DFL does now. Who does she think the DFL compromised with? Themselves?

We have the money to pay back the shift, not because we lowered spending, because WE RAISED TAXES!  State and local spending is now almost 19% of our state's GDP. New taxes include: insurance gross premiums tax, increased Cigarette and tobacco tax, the new estate tax and dept. earnings (fees). Don't forget the increase in individual income tax rates, so these receipts and the corporate tax amounts went up too.  The only tax receipt that went down was sales tax income, probably because we can't afford to buy as much for ourselves, we're too busy working to pay our taxes!

I'm not saying it's all bad news, the economy has improved slightly (we might have gotten some economic overflow from North Dakota!?),
but can't we be a little bit honest about how this new money came about? Minnesota is a great state and other states are worse off than us, making us look relatively good. 
Since before the turn of the century till the late 1950's, Republican policies helped shape this state and we've been blessed with wonderful companies who started here and have made our economy what it is today. We want that to continue, and don't want poor state legislative decisions to ruin it. Other left leaning states have fallen on extremely hard times and continue to struggle. Republicans are worried we're headed the way of Illinois, Michigan or heaven forbid California.