VICTORY IN MN!!! Dem Gov Agrees to GOP Budget

[AgeOfEnlightenmentSCP]

VICTORY IN MINNESOTA!

This ain't 1995, GOP. The voters understand the fiscal issues we are facing, and the old Democrat demagoguery isn't going to work, the scare stories, and the threats aren't taking hold.

STAND FIRM, GOP!

Democrat Governor Mark Dayton Agrees to Republican Budget to End Minnesota Government Shutdown:

www.myfoxtwincities.com/dpp/news/politics/mn-shutdown-dayton-agrees-republican-budget-july-14-2011

Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton and Republican leaders went behind closed doors at 2 p.m. Thursday to discuss a budget proposal with additional conditions that could end the state government shutdown. The trio emerged shortly after 5 p.m. to announce a "framework agreement" has been reached.

The meeting began after the governor sent a letter Thursday morning to House Speaker Kurt Zellers and Senate Majority Leader Amy Koch, saying he "reluctantly" agrees to accept the Republican budget proposal from June 30 if it will end the government shutdown .

“Despite my serious reservations about your plan, I have concluded that continuing the state government shutdown would be even more destructive for too many Minnesotans,” Dayton wrote in the letter. “Therefore, I am willing to agree to something I do not agree with – your proposal – in order to spare our citizens and our state from further damage.”

Dayton said accepting the offer, with conditions, would bridge a $1.4 billion gap between him and the Republican leadership without any more drastic cuts to to essential services.

"If this gets resolved and gets Minnesota back to work in the next few days, then it doesn't matter what people say about me,” Dayton said.

Once an agreement is finalized, Dayton says he’s ready to call a special session to end the shutdown within three days.

Dayton said he has been thinking about making this offer for several days, as it gradually became clear this was only viable way to end the shutdown. The governor has spent the past several weeks traveling around Minnesota to discus the budget with Minnesotans as he waited for a Republican proposal he found reasonable.

“During the past two weeks, I have been listening carefully to people throughout Minnesota,” the governor wrote. “They are telling me that, overwhelmingly, they want this budget dispute resolved.”

[ugonow]

Compromise in Minnesota Is Quick Fix on BudgetBy MONICA DAVEY
Published: July 15, 2011

For days, the Democratic governor of Minnesota watched his state’s shutdown drag on, but insisted that, on principle, he could not go along with Republican lawmakers’ plans for the state’s budget.

But by Wednesday night, Mark Dayton, the governor, was huddling privately with 20 advisers and allies, assessing what he saw as a growing public impatience with the longest shutdown in state history. And by Thursday morning, Mr. Dayton announced he supported a compromise, the outlines of which had been suggested two weeks earlier by the Republicans, signaling what seems likely to be the reopening of state government sometime next week.

“Public sentiment was shifting to ‘Let’s get this over with, regardless of what it takes,’ ” Mr. Dayton said Friday in an interview, as state officials raced to draft details of the spending bills that are expected to be voted on Monday in a special legislative session in St. Paul.

“I just felt that it was going to be needed to be done — and better sooner than later,” he added. “If they can get this agreement now hammered out and passed, I’ll feel that we got the best possible deal, the best for the people of Minnesota, given very difficult circumstances.”

Still, the solution was, in the eyes of many Minnesotans, more of a short-term fix — a borrowing measure to get the state’s parks and rest stops open again — than an answer to the central question that has divided the two parties that control St. Paul: Should the state raise taxes on the rich to pay for services or should it cut spending on those services?

That question seems certain to emerge once more when the state writes its next two-year budget plan two years from now. By then, though, Minnesotans will have voted once more on the makeup of the Legislature, which is dominated by Republicans in both chambers for the first time in about 40 years.

“They can decide then if they want this divided government to continue or not,” Mr. Dayton, who is not up for election until 2014, said of the voters.

www.nytimes.com/2011/07/16/us/16minnesota.html

[ugonow]

After hours of negotiation, Governor Mark Dayton and Republican legislative leaders emerged stone-faced late Thursday to announce they had finally resolved Minnesota's budget impasse. The bargain they struck had ended the nation's longest state shutdown in at least a decade, but neither side seemed happy with a plan that would borrow money from the state's K-12 schools and future payments to the state from a tobacco settlement in order to close a $5 billion budget deficit.

"It's a deal that we can all be disappointed in," said Republican house speaker Kurt Zellers, standing behind a podium inside Minnesota's statehouse early Thursday evening with Dayton and Republican senate majority leader Amy Koch. "It's a deal that is done, a budget that is balanced, a state that can be put back to work. None of us got what we all wanted." Dayton, a Democrat, lost his bid to raise taxes on the richest Minnesotans; Republicans lost their pledge to not raise expenditures beyond the $34 billion in currently in the state's coffers.
(Read about the cost of Minnesota's shutdown.)

It was a sudden end to a budget fight that has left the state bereft of some government services for two weeks. Earlier Thursday, Dayton had made a surprise conciliatory offer to Republicans during a public forum at the University of Minnesota. "I've concluded that the state government shutdown would be too destructive to too many Minnesotans," he told the crowd. It was, in fact, the same one Republicans had offered on June 30, the night before the longest shutdown in the state began. But in throwing the Republicans' own fiscal plan back at them, Dayton also demanded that the GOP drop several social-policy demands, such as restrictions on abortions, embryonic-stem-cell research and stricter voter-ID laws. He also demanded they jettison a proposal that would cut state-agency employment rolls by 15% and added a $500 million bonding proposal to borrow money for construction projects.



Read more: www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2083289,00.html#ixzz1SH47Bpbu

[ugonow]

Minnesota budget deal pushes problem down the road

MINNEAPOLIS, July 15 | Fri Jul 15, 2011 6:23pm EDT

MINNEAPOLIS, July 15 (Reuters) - Although Minnesota reached a budget deal that will end the longest state government shutdown in recent memory, it merely pushes long-term fiscal problems two years down the road, experts said on Friday.

The tentative agreement announced by Democratic Governor Mark Dayton and Republican legislative leaders on Thursday relies on delaying payments and borrowing against future revenues, rather than taking any hard decisions on cutting spending or raising taxes.

And it will do little to ease the tensions between the two political parties over fiscal and social policy issues.

"It does nothing to address the fundamental problems the state has been facing for years," said David Schultz, a Hamline University professor and expert in Minnesota politics.

The deal in Minnesota comes as President Barack Obama and Republicans wrestle over higher taxes versus spending cuts as they try to hammer out a deficit-reduction plan while facing an Aug. 2 deadline on raising the federal government's debt ceiling.

In Minnesota, details on spending bills were being hammered out on Friday and work was expected to continue over the weekend toward holding a special session as early as Monday where the budget could be approved to end the shutdown, now in its third week.

The planned $35.4 billion two-year budget would close a $1.4 billion gap between Democratic and Republican proposals by delaying $700 million of payments to schools and issuing $700 million of bonds backed by tobacco settlement money.

"It leaves the structural problem virtually unchanged and in fact actually makes the structural problem just a little bit worse looking out into 2014 and 2015," said Tom Stinson, a University of Minnesota and state economist.

www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/15/minnesota-shutdown-idUSN1E76E1RY20110715

[ugonow]

Doesn't seem like the "victory" is all that great to me.I think the cost was too high. The citizens of Minnesota lost a lot in the shutdown.

[busymom]

It hasn't been voted on, so it's not over yet....


I'm waiting until the special session that's being called up is done.

[Deleted]

First off I know NOTHING about the government in MN or these issues that are going on now. I do know (my wife if from there) a little general info that is as follows (for those that know even less about the state than I do. Anyone from MN please correct me if I'm wrong or add into that I missed).

Mn is a pretty large state but has a small population for it's size.
Minneapolis St Paul combine to make a major city but it is the only major city in the state. The next population wise size "city" is less than 100,000 people (about the size of San Angelo TX or a little smaller). I don't know about the pay scale for the cities (MN sp) but away from them the pay is fairly low because it's not a real industrialized state. The weather is a major factor there because a lot of food has to be imported. Also because of the weather the roads are a major cost. So you end up with a low tax base plus high state facility cost.

Stuff I noticed.
Once we were married my wife quickly changed her state registry to TX. Not because she wasn't proud of her home state (she was) & not because she hadn't planned on keeping it as her home of registry (for the military) because she did. What happened was at tax time she realized that she would be paying just about as much for state taxes as she was paying for federal taxes (& she didn't even live there). No tax break for being in the military & living out of the state. So Mn has high taxes & no tax break for military. The fact that they are a fairly pro military state, well that should tell you that Mn needs the tax money.

Landfills. When her mother died (a hoarder) the kids got together & cleaned her house (no small job). It basically involved renting a skip (or whatever you call them) & filling it twice with 50 years of garbage. Disposal ended up costing about $12,000 just to haul away that stuff. Here where I live that cost would have been about $1,200 or less. Mn is a "green" state & stuff like that is expensive.

Along that same line weekly garbage is paid for by the bag (something like $1.25 or so for 1 bag of garbage (to some extent that explains a lot of the kept garbage from her mother). That's also one of the oddities that I noticed. In order to keep the state "green" most of the people living in the country burn a lot of their garbage to keep the cost of disposal down. Burning garbage is not a "green" practice but having high disposal costs actually hurt the environment.

I don't know that the tax structure for residents of Mn is but I do know that it's punitive if an out of state resident wants to own a home there (we checked into it). I also know that they have a high sales tax (about the same as TX, but we don't have a state income tax like they do).

My impression was that MN was an expensive state to live in mostly because of their income tax & extra fee's.

[Bluerobin]

Hope the pubs have super majorities in both houses. I am betting the gov vetoes most future pub bills.

[sesfw]

'For days, the Democratic governor of Minnesota watched his state’s shutdown drag on, but insisted that, on principle, he could not go along with Republican lawmakers’ plans for the state’s budget.'

This tells me the only reason Minn Gov didn't want the Pub budget is because it was Pub. Of all the stupid reasons for not passing a budget, this has to be the stupidest. Here is hoping the Federal Pub House tells bho they will call his bluff and shut the country down.

Hooray for common sense.

[ugonow]

But there were a lot of principals that were inserted into the original budget bill,...abortion,stem cell, and a few others. Most reports consider it more of a kick the problem down the street comprimise than a huge victory.

[AgeOfEnlightenmentSCP]

Jul 16, 2011 9:31:27 GMT -5 Bluerobin said:

Hope the pubs have super majorities in both houses. I am betting the gov vetoes most future pub bills.

I don't blame you- most elected politicians in BOTH parties haven't figured it out yet, either: It's over.

The bullshit games, the politics, the parsing of words, the horse trading, the vote buying-- it's all coming to an end rapidly.

This has got to be the closest we've come in my lifetime to an electorate that really understands what's at stake. To save Minnesota, and the other failing and at-risk blue states; and to save the country-- we're going to have to prioritize and live within our means.

If (mostly Democrat) politicians would just face facts, then we could implement the inevitable massive down-sizing of government responsibly and with minimal pain. Much of it could be done through attrition- a worker quits or retires, and we simply don't replace them.

Eliminate obsolete agencies and programs, consolidate the bureaucracies-- most of the federal law enforcement work could be handled through the CIA and FBI. We don't need an NSA, NIS, and myriad other agencies. The Dept of Defense should be able to do the work of the DHS, everything the TSA does should be privatized and performed by the airlines at their expense with FBI and DoD oversight. The airlines have an interest in protecting their assets, passengers have an interest in living through the flight- we need to put that responsibility closer to the stakeholders and give them wide lattitude to so what they need to do.

We can eliminate the EPA, OSHA, and greatly reduce the scope and reach of the Dept of Labor, we could eliminate the Dept of Education-- and basically we could take a look out there and if there's a state version, we don't need a federal. Entitlement reform is another area where we just have to bite the bullet: Medicaid needs to be limited like welfare. No Medicaid for life. If you're poor, we'll help- but you're not permitted to be poor generation after generation. Medicare and SS are insurance for the elderly-- not a public retirement plan.

[AgeOfEnlightenmentSCP]

Well, I'm off to church to thank Jesus the GOP didn't cave this week and pray and ask God the GOP doesn't cave next week.